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Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Methods of Approach 13

2. Postmodern Culture, Aesthetics, and the Arts 33

2.1. Definitions and Conceptions of Postmodernism 33

2.2. Aesthetics of Art vs. Aesthetics of the Environment 45

2.3. The Art Series: Parody, Irony, and the Transformation


of the Artistic Tradition 55

2.4. Intertextuality, the Creative Writer, and the Power-


Resistance Paradigm 72

2.5. Concepts of Aesthetics and the Opposition between


Modernism and Postmodernism 79

2.6. Aesthetics and Ethics: The Aesthetic Attitude and the


Value of Experience 89

3. Situationalism 105

3.1. Concepts of Culture, of Psychology, Sociology, and


the Visual Arts 105

3.2. The Framework of the Narrated Situation 118

3.3. Form as Self-Reflexivity, Narrative Pattern, Collage,


Rhythm, Theme, and Perspective 130

3.4. Situation, Symbol, and Meaning 144


4. Philosophy and Postmodern American Fiction: Patterns
of Disjunction, Complementarity and Mutual
Subversion 163

4.1. Antagonism 164

4.2. Compensation and Complementarity 167

4.3. De-Differentiation and Disjunction 185

4.4. Mutual Subversion 189

4.5. Two Basics of Postmodern Fiction: Language Theory


and Existentialism 190

4.5.1. Wittgenstein, Language,


and the Postmodern Novel 191

4.5.2. Derrida and the “Dissemination” of Meaning 198

4.6. Existentialism 201

4.7. Death and the Absurd 207

4.7.1. Suicide and Clarity, Design and Debris: John


Hawkes, Travesty 211

4.7.2. The Absurdity of the Absurd: John Barth,


“Night-Sea Journey” 214

4.8. Aesthetics in a Nutshell: The Modern and the


Postmodern Paradox. 217

5. The Fantastic 225

5.1. Definitions and Contexts 225

5.2. The Fantastic as Aesthetic Mode 233


5.3. The Postmodern Fantastic Mode: Chaos and
Abstraction, the Void and the “Real” 244

5.4. Strategies of Negation and Re-creation 261

6. The Space-Time Continuum 269

6.1. Spatial Form 274

6.2. Time 277

6.2.1. Linearity, Event, Depth, and Narrative 277

6.2.2. Linear Time as Historical, Teleological,


Mechanical Time 281

6.2.2.1. History, Self, Society, and the Aesthetic


Design: Gass, Coover, Barth 286

6.2.2.2. Presentism and Nomadism 295

6.2.2.3 Multiplications of Times: Pynchon, Gravity’s


Rainbow 300

6.2.3. The Linear Sequence of Plot, Succession


As the Simultaneity of Possibilities 304

6.2.3.1. Versions of Plot 304

6.2.3.2. Simultaneity and Succession 313

6.2.4. Linear Time as Medium of Suspense 320

6.2.5. Cyclical Time as Cosmic Order, as Myth, and as


Repetition of the Familiar: Barth, Beckett, Gaddis,
Reed 323
6.2.6. Psychic-Existential Time: Beckett, Elkin, Barth,
Didion, DeLillo, Gass 330

6.2.7. The Ordinary and the Extraordinary, Routine and


Extremity: Elkin and Barthelme 339

6.2.7.1. Stanley Elkin: The Great Satisfactions of the


Ordinary 34 4

6.2.7.2. Donald Barthelme: The Lost Middle State 351

6.3. Space and Spatial Form 354

6.3.1. Towards Modernism 354

6.3.2. Postmodern Fiction: Alternatives 360

6.3.3. Appearance and Disappearance 366

6.3.4. Significant Oppositions: Closure and Openness,


Sameness and Difference, The Inanimate and the
Animate 369

6.3.5. Liberation: Abstraction and Fantastication 377

6.3.6. Liberation: Movement, Closure, and Aimlessness 381

6.3.7. Spatial Symbolism 388

6.3.7.1. William Gass, The Tunnel 393

6.3.7.2. Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon 398

6.3.7.3. John Barth, Giles Goat-Boy 401

6.3.7.4. William Gaddis, JR 405

6.3.7.5. John Hawkes, The Blood Oranges 407


6.3.7.6. Donald Barthelme, “The Glass Mountain”,
“The Balloon” 410

6.3.8. The Labyrinth 414

6.3.9. The Written Page as Labyrinth of Reading and


Seeing: The Mutual Suspension of Simultaneity
and Succession in Sukenick and Federman 419

7. Character 423

7.1. The Systematic View: The Essentialist Self, Identity,


Uniqueness, and Authenticity 425

7.2. The Historical View of the Essentialist Character:


Modernism vs. Postmodernism 430

7.3. Structuralism, the Decenterment of Character, and the


Creation of the Subject 439

7.4. Poststructuralism, the Deconstruction of the Subject,


and the Introduction of Time 443

7.5. Gilbert Sorrentino, Mulligan Stew: The Connection


and Clash of Character Concepts 455

7.6. Reader Response 457

7.7. Character and Situation: The Activities of Conscious-


ness and the Creation of Imaginary Worlds 460

7.8. Emotion 463

7.9. Desire 473

7.10. Belief 479

7.11. Perception, Consciousness, and the Object 483


7.11.1. The Mysteries of the Void: Samuel Beckett,
“Imagination Dead Imagine” 485

7.11.2. “Objectified Subjectivity”: Alain Robbe-Grillet,


Jealousy 488

7.11.3. Implosion of the Exterior: William Burroughs,


Naked Lunch 492

7.12. Reflection and Fiction 495

7.12.1. Grammatical Subject vs. Subject of Reflection:


Beckett, The Unnamable 509

7.12.2. Reflection Against Belief: Robert Coover, The


Public Burning 512

7.12.3. Love Against Reason: John Barth, “Menelaiad” 521

7.12.4. Feeling, Reflection, and Perception: Ronald


Sukenick, “The Permanent Crisis” 526

7.12.5. Positions of Innocence and Experience: William


Gass, Omensetter’s Luck 530

7.12.6. Self-Reflexivity and the “Voice of Language”:


Barth and Federman 535

7.13. The Minimalistic Program: Behavior and the


Diagrammatic Method 539

7.13.1. The Diagrammatic Method and Postmodern


Satire: Donald Barthelme 542

7.13.2. Minimalism: Richard Brautigan, Renata Adler,


Kurt Vonnegut, Walter Abish, Gilbert Sorrentino 548

7.14. Action in Fiction 551


7.14.1. Behavior Against Action: Richard Brautigan,
In Watermelon Sugar 561

7.14.2. Active Participation Against Passive Distance:


John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor 563

7.14.3. Action, Drifting, Reflection: Thomas Pynchon,


The Crying of Lot 49 565

7.14.4. “Just Doing” Against “What Is Worth Doing?”


Business Against Art: William Gaddis, JR 574

7.14.5. Voodoo-Aesthetics, and Action as Life Force:


Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo 580

8. The Imagination 587

8.1. The Imagination and the Imaginary 587

8.2. Kant and the Postmodern Imagination: The Beautiful


and the Sublime 591

9. The Perspectives of Negation: The Satiric, the


Grotesque, the Monstrous, Farce and Their
Attenuation by Play, Irony, and the Comic Mode 605

10. The Novel After Postmodernism 623

10.1. Postmodernism and After 623

10.2. The Gap and the Void, The Mysterious and the
Grotesque 630

10.3. Strategies of Excess 637

10.4. Experiments with Realism and the Social View 644


10.5. Telling Stories 652

Notes 659

Primary Sources 689

Secondary Sources 695

Index 741
1. Introduction: Methods of Approach

Modernism and postmodernism will in this text be viewed in


terms of continuity and discontinuity. The experimental tendencies in
postmodern art are interpreted against the backdrop of the overall
cultural and social context, which creates both the intellectual climate
and the material conditions for making of art. Postmodernism is a
complex phenomenon. It is a product of the Sixties, but not their
sum. The Sixties are a composite of contradictory trends, as is
postmodernism. This explosive decade may create what Susan
Sontag called a new “unitary sensibility”; however, the new
sensibility is not uniform but plural. Like the Sixties, postmodernism
is diverse: it extends into the culture at large, it defines the theories
that explain the condition of the lifeworld and the arts, and it is
responsible for the innovative power of the creative arts. Each of
these three areas of postmodernism has its own “rationality complex”
(Habermas); each highlights different attributes of the Sixties; each
extends beyond the Sixties and develops its own perspective(s).The
rationalities of the three (or more) aspects of postmodernism connect
and form a unity within multiplicity. The postmodernism of the
Sixties is the result of the liberation from the restraints of the Fifties.
It extends into the past and the future. The Sixties turned against
what was conceived as the general mood and the dominant notes of
the Fifties: materialism, moralism, individualism, self-consciousness,
domesticity, and privacy, de-politicization, anxiety, the Cold War
and the Bomb; they rejected the methods of manipulation and what
Marcuse called “surplus repression”, the blacklists and union purges,
and above all the pervading spirit of hypocrisy. It was a spirit of
deconstruction that prevailed; its complement, the spirit of
reconstruction, was less sure in its goals. Postmodernism participated
in this dialectic of deconstruction and reconstruction, as did
postmodern fiction; both, however, did so in their own, quite
different ways. The changes, of course, did not come overnight; the
ground for the shift was prepared in the Fifties. The first postmodern
novels were written in the Fifties as were the first rebellious
statements.
14 Introduction: Methods of Approach

Postmodernism is not only a national phenomenon. Since it


is not just a fashionable cult but a far-reaching reordering and
revaluation not only of art, music and literature, but of the very
notions of what culture and civilization are, should be and can be, it
spreads across the western civilizations, though of course in different
ways and degrees. America is the center of these movements,
culturally and artistically, but the theories of deconstruction that
accompany the advance of postmodernism are mostly of European
origin. The development of postmodernism seen from the vantage
point of the end of the century shows how alive it was with
possibility but also how contradictory its features were. It had the
status of a new paradigm, quite similar to that which Thomas Kuhn
has described for revolutionary change in the sciences. Beginning
with the critique of the Fifties and modernism, it broadens into a
sensibility and mode of writing, is then interpreted as a general
cultural phenomenon and dominates the cultural scene for twenty-
five to thirty years before exhausting itself. Postmodern art grows out
of and participates in the new postmodern spirit but it also has its
own rationale as a language of art. Its rebellion against the rigid art
ideology of modernism creates a new mode of experience, a new
consciousness, a new intellectual style and, above all, new playful
possibilities for the imagination unhampered by the frustrations of
existential alienation and the over-serious devotion to awareness,
which did not allow fiction a significant variation of perspectives
after modernism reached its peak, which thereby limited the range of
innovation. At the same time, the radical experimentalism of
postmodern art is a continuation of the modern focus on form, even
ex negativo in the experiments with anti-form, so that one should
speak, as already mentioned, of both continuity and discontinuity
between the two. The double-directedness of art towards both the
general trends of the cultural scene and its own art tradition puts the
concepts and practices of the arts in a position in-between two
influences. This means that postmodern fiction, though it grows out
of the spirit of the Sixties, is by no means only the reflection of the
specificities of the Sixties or its postmodernist credos. Though it is
that too, it is also critical and subversive, following its age-old
function to mark the deficits of the time.
The present study concerns itself with postmodern American
writers. Yet it has to take account of the fact that although American
Introduction: Methods of Approach 15

postmodern fiction is a national narrative, it is at the same time post-


national or, rather, “transnational”, and pursues a “politics of non-
identity” (Posnock 34), and is in fact participating in, even domi-
nating a (perhaps last) cosmopolitan phase in the arts that resembles
also in its cosmopolitanism the trends of modernism. For this reason
it will be necessary to refer in the course of the argument to writers
outside the United States who were important to American narrative,
writers such as Beckett, Borges, Márquez, Nabokov, but also Joyce,
Kafka, and others. Of central interest will be the American authors
who by common consent are seen to occupy the center of American
postmodern fiction, i.e., in alphabetical order, John Barth, Donald
Barthelme, Richard Brautigan, Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin,
Raymond Federman, William Gaddis, John Hawkes, Jerzy Kosinski,
Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Ronald Sukenick, and Kurt
Vonnegut. Reference will also be made to other postmodern writers,
such as Apple, Burroughs, Davenport, Heller, McElroy, or Wurlizer,
as well as to some of those writers who have been strongly
influenced by postmodern strategies, like Adler, Auster, Doctorow,
DeLillo, Didion, or Purdy. The focus on the highly experimental
phase of the 1960s and 1970s is an attempt to be as inclusive as
possible and as precise as necessary. Still, whenever earlier or later
works of the prominent writers of the Sixties and Seventies offer
further knowledge or confirm the main trends in an important way
we will include them in our argument. Examples of such are
Hawkes’s The Cannibal (1949), and Gaddis’s The Recognitions
(1955), or Gass’s The Tunnel (which was begun and started to appear
in portions in the Sixties and was published as a whole in 1995), as
well as Coover’s John’s Wife (1996) and Briar Rose (1996), Barth’s
On with the Story (1996), Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (1997), or
Gass’s Cartesian Sonata and Other Stories (1998). The con-
centration on the two decades when American postmodern narrative
can be said to have dominated experimental literature in the US will,
hopefully, minimize the danger of overgeneralization and will allow
concrete analysis of the narrative concepts and strategies that direct
the American postmodern matrix of narrative possibilities.
Postmodern fiction is here understood as a very serious,
sometimes desperate, but also playful attempt to cope with the
accumulated dubieties, insecurities, vagaries and skepticisms of our
time. It does this by creating a montaged confusion of discourses and
16 From Modernism to Postmodernism

realms, of presence and absence, by producing a field of intersections


where expiring and evolving ideas and strategies meet, and by
seeking in the remaking of the world and the fusion of design and
debris the liberating source of the imaginary. It struggles in the face
of the recognized reign of the void and the gap and death, which
gives fiction an additional existential dimension. Our study will
relate the narrative texts to the traditions and conventions of fiction,
to the cultural and social context from which they draw, and to the
other arts where it is feasible. The analysis of postmodern narrative is
here concerned with the imaginary worlds of fiction, the concepts on
which they are based, and the perspectives and strategies used for
their creation. These worlds are situation-oriented: they have a
“local” quality that is shared by epistemological and ethical
structures. Pluralism and a multiplicity of perspectives change the
relations of dominance in a spirit of liberation, a sense of joy at being
released from stifling traditions and ideologies. The field of
experience dominates over the experiencing subject, and this field is
constructed as surface without redeeming depth, except for the
looming void. The singular situations and sequences of situations are
arranged in terms of disparity and incoherence. The succession of
situations and constellations departs from what might be considered a
“good” sequentiality, together with the bonds of uni-vocal causality
and logic. The upshot of these developments is what we will later
call “situationalism”, a situational —not a totalizing or historicizing
—orientation, not only in fiction but also in the culture at large, a
stance which is directed towards presentism, eclecticism and
fragmentation. These tendencies serve in fiction the double purpose
of deconstructing what is clichéd and used up and of exuberantly
reconstructing the new imaginary worlds under the reign of play,
irony, and the comic mode, which serve to create a plurality of
viewpoints. Situationalism and its connotations will be an important
starting point for the analysis of the deconstruction of the basic
narrative unit, the situation, into fragments and its reconstruction by
montage and collage, and the multiplication of the story.
There are maximalist and minimalist forms of postmodern
fiction. We will take note of both the similarities and the differences
between these artistic approaches to the common postmodern literary
and cultural condition. The creative “excess” of Barth, Pynchon,
McElroy, and others, continues the maximalist tradition of Herman
Introduction: Methods of Approach 17

Melville, Henry James, Thomas Wolfe, and William Faulkner.


Barthelme’ s short fictions of the Sixties and Seventies exemplify, on
the one hand, the continuation and radicalization of the aesthetic
minimalism in the tradition of Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson
and Ernest Hemingway (see also Raymond Carver, Brautigan,
Hawkes, and others) but, on the other, the danger of repetitiveness in
the second part of the Seventies. It is evident in both artistic
approaches that, as Vattimo notes, postmodernism demonstrates its
own doubts in its ability to overcome critically, and progress
definitely, beyond modernism and to disentangle itself from
representation and the demands of the good continuity of form (1988,
164-171). In fact, most of both the “putter-inners” and the “leaver-
outers” among the experimental writers —terms created by Thomas
Wolfe (643) when he defended himself against Fitzgerald’s criticism
of his maximalism of detail and applied by Sukenick and Elkin to
postmodern fiction1 — returned to the more linear, coherent and
“realistic” forms of narrative in their texts of the eighties and
nineties, even though, as Baudrillard claims, “the real is no longer
what it used to be” (1988b, 171).
When approaching these texts, one can of course choose
quite different perspectives. If it is true that “there is a sense in which
narratology has only ever had two categories to work with” and that
“[w]e might loosely term them the anthropological and textual”, this
book attempts to bridge the gap between the two, between “the
represented and the linguistic, the human and the material, world and
structure, even signified and signifier and content and form” (Gibson
236). The workings of the imagination, in postmodern fiction as
elsewhere, follow and express the anthropological equipment of
humans. Among the many there are two crucial but decisively
different approaches to postmodern American fiction. The great
weight given in postmodern narrative to reflexivity and self-
reflexivity, to the preoccupation with art, its rules and failures, its
fictionality inside and outside the text2 has initiated a critical
approach that focuses on what has been called “meta-fiction”, the
textual reflection on its own status, the recurrence to and disruption
of the literary tradition and the conventions of the novel, and the
recast and reformulation of what is known of the figures and events
of “real” history. Emphasizing the latter point, Linda Hutcheon
speaks of “historiographic meta-fiction” (1988), which includes a
18 From Modernism to Postmodernism

whole range of works like E. L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel,


Coover’s The Public Burning, Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo or
Salman Rushdie’s Shame, and excludes others that do not refer to the
“real” historical world.
The fantastication and imaginary transformation of “worlds”
in postmodern fiction, on the other hand, has induced Brian McHale
to suggest that, though there is continuity between modernism and
postmodernism (which also Hutcheon recognizes), the dominant
concerns have changed from epistemological to ontological ones.
While the modern writers were occupied with epistemological
questions —questions directed towards the truth of knowledge, the
problems of identity, and the existential anxieties provoked by doubt,
disillusionment and the quest for meaning —the ontological pre-
occupation of postmodern fiction is concerned not so much with
truth, but with being and the existence of autonomous worlds (which
of course reflect a fictional truth). McHale recognizes that the dif-
ference between epistemological and ontological concerns are only
gradual, since questions of the comprehensibility of the world and
the self precede and are always implied in ontological questions. But
with the ontological dominant he sees a shift in emphasis towards
questions like: “What is a world?; What kinds of world are there,
how are they constituted, and how do they differ?; What happens
when different kinds of world are placed in confrontation, or when
boundaries between worlds are violated?” (10).
If these are the problems that postmodern fiction is
concerned with, then they are of course also the questions that a
critical examination of postmodern fiction must ask. This book
attempts to contribute to the answer of such questions as “What kinds
of worlds are there?” Though the postmodern fictional worlds are
obviously “fantastic”, the problem is, what is fantastic, and how are
such worlds built? Being indeed worlds, they apparently are
constructed as such, i.e., by forming situations and sequences of
situations. They share components like space, time, characters,
actions or events with the “real” world and “realistic” fiction, even
though they are all marked by the deconstructive turn and, after the
breakdown of representational schemes, are used to playfully
reconstruct new worlds out of old ones.
Before we then turn to the analysis of the postmodern
fictional worlds, their modes of construction and evaluation, the
Introduction: Methods of Approach 19

following chapter serves as an introduction into the general problems


of both postmodernism and postmodern fiction. We shall discuss the
multifariousness of conceptualizations of the postmodern; the
multiplication of the post-phenomena; the three areas of post-
modernism — the culture at large, theory, and the arts; the
fundamental aspects of postmodernism — the postmodern era, the
postmodern historical strand, and postmodernism as an anthro-
pological constant, a deconstructive sensibility; furthermore, the
inclusive and the exclusive definitions, the changes and
contradictions in the concepts of postmodernism. Postmodern
aesthetics will be considered under the aspects of art as well as the
environment, the culture at large as well as aesthetics of art and
cultural aesthetics. A third dimension of aesthetics is what one might
call the aesthetic attitude: it is abstracted from the aesthetic
experience and becomes transferable to all areas of life and thought;
it is characterized by the acknowledgment of multiplicity and
otherness and tolerance. Where feasible, verbal art will be compared
with visual art; both are related to the traditions of their art
disciplines, to the cultural environment and the popular and
commercial culture, as well as to the aesthetic attitude in general.
Since the totalizing features of narrative — character, plot,
theme — have been deconstructed, and the narrated situation has
become the basis of the fictional argument, we shall consign the third
chapter to a discussion of the concepts of “situation” and
“situationalism” in culture, in psychology, sociology, the visual arts,
and especially in narrative, where character struggles in vain with
situation. The narrated situation with (at least) four constitutive
elements is regarded the smallest narrative unit in fiction.
Consequently, narrative is seen to be the situational transformation of
meaning. The elements of the situation are space and time (the
natural frame), and character and action (the social frame). They are
always “there”, even if they are not filled with details, and appear
“under erasure” (Derrida), as a “minus function” (Lotman), since
they define and compose the situation. Composition and perspective
create the profile of the narrated situation and are thus the basic
agents of form in fiction. This basic narrative form is invaded by
force, which makes for the fundamental conflict between
construction and deconstruction, deconstruction and reconstruction,
20 From Modernism to Postmodernism

or, in other words, between order and chaos, stability and fluidity in
postmodern fiction.
The analysis of “situationalism” in culture and thought and
of the structure of the narrated situation and its shape in postmodern
fiction is followed by a consideration under two aspects of the
deconstruction and reconstruction of meaning in postmodern fiction.
One is innertextual and has been important for the development of
the novel since the eighteenth century: the symbolic method. The
reason for using the symbolic method of signification in postmodern
fiction is the same as it was for romantic, “realistic”, and modern
fiction: to fill gaps of knowledge that cannot be filled by rational
explanatory — with the difference, however, that now the gaps have
widened to include the void, and that the suggestions of symbolic
meaning have increased in uncertainty to a point that meaning
becomes diffused and includes chaos and that not the inherent
meaning of the symbolic vehicle but the willfully improved per-
spective reigns absolute. The other aspect of meaning-building is
intertextual, in which the relationship between postmodern American
fiction and trends in philosophy, psychology, and language theory
will be analyzed. The links between fiction and philosophy will be
considered in terms of antagonism, complementarity, disjunction,
and mutual subversion. This will entail a discussion of language
theory, existentialism, the absurd, and the formal principle of the
paradox, and their combined influence on postmodern narrative
strategies. This gives rise to the discussion of what has been called
the basic condition of postmodern fiction, the fantastic, its meaning
in psychology, sociology and the arts. The investigation of the
fantastic as attitude and aesthetic category in its various forms, also
as magic realism, leads to a first overview of the formal strategies of
disruption in postmodern fiction.
The elements of the situation — space, time, character and
action/event — will supply the parameters for the further analysis of
postmodern fiction. These elements have their own continuities, and
they establish different relations of dominance within the situation
and in the sequence of situations. Their representation or non-
representation, as well as their fantastic transformation, tell us
something about the characteristics of the created worlds and their
meaning or refusal of meaning. As mentioned, time and space form
the “natural” frame of the situation, while character and action/event
Introduction: Methods of Approach 21

form the social one. Both frames of course interrelate. Time, like
space a mental construct, is analyzed in terms of linear time as
historical, teleological, mechanical time; time as medium of suspense
and plot; time as cyclical time and cosmic order, as myth and
repetition of the familiar; and time as psychic-existential time, the
“moment of being” (Virginia Woolf). In addition there will be a
consideration of time as the basis of the ordinary and the
extraordinary.
The handling of space reveals the importance of the
disappearance-appearance paradigm, the reduction and abstraction of
place, the reduction and expansion of movement, and the incoherent
and coherent figuration of the quest. Spatial metaphors like the
Moebius strip, the spiral and the labyrinth expose and metaphorically
name the paradoxical attempt — in the absence of a rational,
conceptual interpretation of the world — to find a stable (spatial)
model for what in the narrative process is imaginary, time-bound,
fluent and only relative to our perceptions. The notion of the
labyrinth as metaphor for the world, the self and the narrative text,
for space, time, plot and character, so conspicuous in the work of
Borges, Robbe-Grillet, Pynchon, or Barth, will receive special
attention.
Fictional character is seen in the context of traditional,
structuralist, and poststructuralist concepts. Character by no means
disappears, as is often maintained, in postmodern fiction, but rather is
transformed into manifold figurations and functions, which no longer
focus on the self (at least not in the way modernism did). In fact,
“there are all kinds of characters, and characters of all kinds” (Gass
1985, 92). Characters are constructed so as to expose their nature as
constructions. They are “scenario-making” (Barth, OwS 147), are
“empty canvas”, the “noise of [their] names[s]”, “a matter of
degree”; they have an “organizing value”, and are “those primary
substances to which everything else is attached” (Gass 1970, 45, 50,
51 49). They are “emotional centers”, but are “failure[s] in the
practice of ordinary existence” and may “get out of control” (Gass
1985, 102, 32, 284). Perspectivism and paradoxical combinations of
often mutually exclusive aspects are foundational to postmodern
fiction in general, and to postmodern fictional character in particular.
Character as constituent element of the narrated situation must
therefore be analyzed in terms of quite contrary notions of what
22 From Modernism to Postmodernism

characters are and can be in fiction, as subjects of experience and


thought or simply as intersections of qualities and actions (Barthes),
as “stranger[s] in a world of strangers”, (Gass 1985, 249) or as mere
“linguistic center[s]” (51), and as “word-beings [...] outside any
predetermined condition” (Federman 1975, 13). Though character is
not fully separated from a self — in fact it often frustratedly and
nostalgically returns to it — it is decentered for the purpose of easy
transformation. It is “changeable”, “unstable”, “illusory”, “made of
fragments” (Federman 1975, 12, 13); it does not have a fixed core
and an indissoluble unique essence; the faculties of the mind do not
form a unity. The writer can isolate them when creating the narrated
world, so that perception, reflection, (mere) “behavior” or action
determine the image of the world they create. Feeling and desire, of
course, must be included in the cluster of faculties that make up
experience, but they will concern us later in the section about
character.
Perception, a mere sensory rendering of the world, creates
only surfaces. In order to mark the problematic relationship between
subject and object, the normal processing of the perceived by the
categories of understanding is cut off, so that perception stands alone
with an abyss between the object and its potential significance. There
are now only (futile) attempts of consciousness to understand what is
perceived by the senses by reflecting upon it, a procedure that is
bound to fail because it has to suspend or relativize the causal and
logical ways of understanding. Beckett’s “Imagination Dead
Imagine”, Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy, and Burroughs’s Naked Lunch
will be our examples. In their different ways, they all reduce the
subject to a perceiving consciousness.
Reflection (together with imagination) has a central function
in the mental economy of consciousness and participates in the
creation of its structure. Since consciousness is a central focus of
postmodern narrative, reflection also plays a major part. Con-
sciousness is act-like in its outer- and inner-directedness: it processes
the data of perception, reflects about circumstances, the self (even if
there is none), and love, takes the form of meta-reflection about art,
or turns to itself, enquiring about the basis of reflection. John Barth
plays on the whole spectrum of reflection and reflection about
reflection, rigorously complicating the narrative. Reflection is
confronted in its activity, function and relevance with sensory
Introduction: Methods of Approach 23

perception, action, feeling and belief, i.e., a cluster of different


activities of the mind and the soul that create other viewpoints. We
shall consider them separately. The problematization and assessment
of the respective values of these activities and perspectives in the
interrelation of subject and object create a kind of ersatz for themes
of morality, identity, and truth.
Behavior is the key term for Barthelme’s program of
attenuation and his diagrammatic method, shared by other writers
(Hawkes, Brautigan, Vonnegut, Wurlizer). Of course “behavior” of a
subject can also include mere observing, just as behavior can be
perceived. But it seems advisable to reserve the term “behavior” for a
more “factual” attitude toward what is experienced. The
diagrammatic method that goes hand in hand with the reduction of
the subject to mere behavior makes a point of opposing “[e]xtreme
stylistic simplicity in description” and “a very complex ordering”
(Butler 49). The text is written from a sensory viewpoint in a cool,
distant manner, made strange by simplifying reductions of narrative
means in spite of a subject matter that would “normally” call for a
sensitive approach and emotional or moral response. Minimalistic
strategies and what Barthelme calls “stuffing”, “dreck” or “trash”,
the words that fill the empty spaces between other words and seem
heavy and endless, as well as deceptive compromises with realistic
methods here effect fragmentation and a maximal fantastification (cf.
“The Indian Uprising”). This model of planned incongruity and
montage of styles (cf. Snow White) negates the whole complex of
reader expectations.
Postmodern fiction neglects action insofar as action defines
the character as a free and self-determined agent. Paranoia is the final
impulse for direct action, even when action passes over into drifting
as in Pynchon’s novels. Drifting is an important image for
postmodern fiction because it indicates the state in between acting
and being acted upon. It is the key notion in Rudolf Wurlizer’s
novels Nog, Flats, and Quake, in which drifting includes the fusion
and separation of identities without intention and feeling. In
postmodern fiction, the Hemingway code of action is replaced by a
cult of self-consciousness or passivity so stringent that no action
whatever appears to be possible. There is, however, an exception.
Action is thematized as the parody of the quest, as a by now aimless,
emptied activity, as “just doing” in contrast to “what is worth doing”
24 From Modernism to Postmodernism

(Gaddis, JR), or as an expression of the unconscious, as program of


resistance against civilizational repression (Pynchon, The Crying of
Lot 49; Reed, Mumbo Jumbo). While in modernist texts outer events
have scarcely ever a focusing function (with the exception of
Hemingway), the event and the relationship between action and outer
event plays an important role in many postmodern texts, the event
signaling the determination from outside, from some kind of
“System”.
The driving force behind the creation of aesthetic worlds is
the imagination. Imagination is the key term in postmodern
aesthetics. It refers alternately to the intention of the author, the
intentionality of the text, and the response of the reader. It is thus the
leading principle of postmodern literary production, mediation, and
consumption. Even though the term “imagination” is employed with
various meanings in various contexts, it is in postmodernism always
directed against aesthetic concepts like mimesis, interpretation, and
“meaning”, in favor of notions like immanence, indeterminacy, ro-
tation of possibilities. In lieu of the crucial aesthetic beliefs of the
19th century, it starts a new radical exploration of the threshold of
the mind (the fantastic) and of language (“language games”) in terms
of deconstruction and reconstruction, which are both metonymic and
metaphoric.
The romantics, symbolists, and also the modernists already
revered the imagination as a faculty of absolute synthesis. Blake held
that “This world is all one continued vision of Fancy or Imagination”
(qtd. by Casey 1), Poe and Baudelaire spoke of the imagination as the
“Queen of the faculties” (Baudelaire 1962, 312), and Baudelaire
echoed Blake in saying that “Imagination created the world” (321).
In the 20th century, Anatole France stated apodictically that “to
know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything” (France, pt. II, ch.
2), and Wallace Stevens followed suit in only slightly more subdued
fashion by saying that “The best definition of true imagination is that
it is the sum of our faculties” (Stevens 24), and that “imagination is
the only genius” (25).
The postmodern notion of imagination is different from its
modern version. It is more radical and includes all aspects of the
mind, from the comparatively simple ability to create images (Hume,
Kant) to the ability to deconstruct and reconstruct an ever-faster
changing world that resists any kind of final conceptualizing.
Introduction: Methods of Approach 25

Structuralists and poststructuralists have rejected the idea of the


primacy of an autonomous imagination, together with the notion of
an imagining subject as a transcendental source of meaning, as
advocated by philosophers like Kant, Schelling, Husserl, and Sartre.
Many postmodern theorists “regard imagination as a mystified and
mystifying bourgeois notion, a romantic way of concealing the real
roots of creativity which reach down not into some dark inner world
but into that ideology which it is the radical critic’s task to
demystify” (Washington 163). Deconstruction decenters and de-
values the concepts of the autonomous imagination. For Lacan the
imaginary is a narcissistic illusion. Althusser and others relate
Lacan’s concept of the imagination to ideology in the sense of false
consciousness. As an imaginary assemblage the imagination is a
“structure of misrecognition” (Althusser 219).3 After the imagination
has lost the status of an independent, integrative faculty, it now has to
be defined within an additional frame of reference. At the end of the
book the concept of the imagination will lead us to a concluding and
synthesizing view, and we will study its conceptionalizations in
history, especially in postmodernism, and examine Kant’s conception
of the beautiful and the sublime in connection with related
postmodern concepts.
Postmodern fiction is a self-reflexive art-form, with a keen
suspicion of the referential function of language and therefore
without any stable relationship to external reality or previously
accepted codes of production. Literary standards and rules are
exposed as the conventional and artificial, frequently clichéd for-
mulas they are. Our normal expectations of temporal and thematic
progression and univocal meaning are suspended and shown in their
artifice. Self-reflexivity, expressed in the doubts of author, narrator
or character about the world and his or her own art, has its own
narrative perspectives. These are the critical stances that arise out of
sheer incongruity and lay bare the deficits of society in morals,
standards and beliefs, in knowledge and understanding. These
stances are, namely, the grotesque, the monstrous, and play, irony,
parody and the comic mode. Satire aims at criticism of social
deformation from a safe value point. The grotesque grows out of
satire when all values are denied; it denotes the inexplicable
deformation of humans by humans. Farce may render the grotesque
lightly. The monstrous is a postmodern outgrowth of the grotesque,
26 From Modernism to Postmodernism

the ineffable extremity of evil. Play is here “free” play (Derrida) of


the mind upon things, conventions and structures. Irony is an attitude
of negativity and includes irony as attitude, method, and form.
Parody ironizes and transforms texts, traditions, and styles, and may
gain new work out of an old one. The postmodern comic mode is a
“free” kind of comic perspective that reduces the comic conflict to a
collision of concepts, a flipping-over of positions, the ridiculous
simultaneity of the non-simultaneous.
We will emphasize the postmodern use of these perspectives
of incongruity and deconstruction, and their interaction. For reasons
of space, these modes of judgment cannot be analyzed here
systematically. Each one must be treated separately and at the same
time be put in relation to the other, neighboring perspectives. In
anticipation of a longer study that should include the history of these
modes and their appearance in the novel of the nineteenth century
and of modernism, we will give an overview of the characteristics
and change of these perspectives of incongruity and negation at the
end of the book. It may suffice to note at this point that all the
perspectives mentioned have a more or less independent status as
conceptualizations of both attitudes and modes of writing. As such
they have the advantage of designating both general human
viewpoints and literary categories. Satire, the grotesque, the
monstrous and the comic mode are all critical perspectives; they can
be related in a chain of categories. By relating these different stances
of evaluation with one another in such a series, the scheme of
perspectives provides for transitions and overlaps, and thus becomes
more flexible. Though the satiric, the grotesque, the comic, and the
parodic modes are understood as models of understanding with
inherent structures of their own, with different profiles of
contradiction and negativity, they all depend on a basis of
incongruity and have a similar dualistic structure. This common base
makes their interaction possible and attractive, while the more or less
sharp edge provides for variability and change. Play, irony, and the
comic mode are fed by lively energies, not structural unities, and in
being deconstructive and reconstructive at the same time they are
paradoxical in their results. These perspectives are the means of
attenuating the stricter modes of negation like satire, the grotesque,
and the monstrous and prepare the ground for a multiplication and
superimposition of attitudes and viewpoints and foster the resulting
Introduction: Methods of Approach 27

complexities of the postmodern text. Being set against holistic views,


against static notions of truth, identity and morals, as well as against
the sequential and mono-causal types of narration, these stances
favor the serial method of composition and the notion of multi-
causality, whether they are rationalized within the text as with
Borges and Barth or left unexplained, as autonomous characteristics
of the text, as with Robbe-Grillet and frequently with Barthelme,
Elkin, and Hawkes. These principles of construction are divorced
from the traditional/modern “expressive” aims, or at least relativize
them. They perform, play with, and dramatize the possibilities of
their own serial form. They lay bare the chaotic internal conflicts of
free invention, and thereby establish the postmodern irony of form
based on an overall irony of attitude.
To match the complexity of postmodern fiction with a
complexity of analytic or descriptive tools is the greatest challenge
for the critic. A look at these complexities, together with some
remarks about how to face them, may here conclude this introductory
chapter. Obviously the critic cannot get very far with concepts of
truth, meaning or identity, which are rejected, transformed or
multiplied, often excessively, by postmodern writers. The interpreter
of meaning and structure in the modernist sense has difficulty in
adapting the cognitive frames of reference to these texts and
preparing the reader for their reception and evaluation. Critic and
reader face texts whose formal strategies replace totality with
multiplicity, register the loss of centers (God, reason, identity,
history, America, Art), and foreground discontinuity, incoherence,
non-structurability, and, instead of uni-linear logic, of progress and
synthesis, emphasize rather the “process of making and remaking”
(Foucault 1970, l976) and the practice of reflecting upon the artistic
process. In the light of these disquieting circumstances Ihab Hassan
certainly has a point when he rejects the analytic and interpretative
methods of criticism: “Criticism should learn about discontinuity and
become itself less than the sum of its parts. It should offer the reader
empty spaces, silences, in which he can meet himself in the presence
of literature. This is anti-criticism, or better still, paracriticism”
(1970, 91).
Another way to approach these texts, which we will follow,
is to describe and analyze what is there, namely the imaginary and its
worlds, without ideological prejudice, in the terms of their own
28 From Modernism to Postmodernism

constructive principle, which is pluralism. The pluralism of the texts,


which is a pluralism of perspectives and procedures, of narration and
reflection, and finally of worlds, is established by two basic
strategies, deconstruction and reconstruction. We shall make them
the two guiding principles of our approach to American New Fiction.
The deconstructive perspectives of play, irony, parody, and the comic
mode reduce, even deny the value of coherence, the “good”
continuity, and the wholeness of form, values which, intentionally at
least, define most of modernist fiction. The reconstruction principle
of postmodern fiction therefore has to search for new ways to fulfill
its task. As we noted, juxtapositions, situational effects and serial
compositions often take the place of integration, causality and plot,
or at least transform and multiply their function and meaning. These
developments towards decomposition and decenterment are reflected
and identified in a number of postmodern paradigms that can be
listed in dialectic terms: (1) disappearance versus appearance; (2)
absence versus presence, or presence in absence; (3) possibility
versus actuality; (4) isolated segmentation versus logic continuation;
(5) force versus form. These are matrices for the situational
construction-deconstruction-reconstruction of worlds and will guide
the following discussion, which, as mentioned, takes its further
criteria from the construction of the narrated situation, the basic unit
of fiction. Our argument will be based on the assumption that
postmodern fiction, with the complexity of its schemes, further
pursues the path that Victor Shklovsky marked with the term
“defamiliarization”, defamiliarization of that which has become too
familiar and worn out — in the case of postmodern art: the
defamiliarization of anthropocentric truth and meaning, as well as of
totalizing form. Fiction furthermore “follows” Michael Bakhtin in
breaking up the unquestioned organism of art, in refuting the
understanding of texts as organic unities, as integrated structures in
which all loose ends are finally gathered into aesthetic wholeness. It
consequently makes montage and collage the ordering rule of
composition, and employs “perspectivism” (Nietzsche), instead of
unilinear logic, as a principle of evaluation. The result is complexity.
The writers themselves speak of complexity and even chaos
as something to seek and to cherish for the deconstruction of form
(cf. statements by Federman, Sukenick, and others that will be
discussed later). Barth notes the “aesthetic pleasure of complexity, of
Introduction: Methods of Approach 29

complication and unraveling, suspense and the rest” (1984, 114). For
Coover the world is characterized by the fact that “each single instant
of the world is so impossibly complex, we cannot accumulate all the
data needed for a complete, objective statement” (Gado 152). And
the complexity of art indeed corresponds to a general paradigm of
“complexity”, to what has been called “chaos theory”. The dynamic
complexity of “deterministic chaos” (meaning the impossibility of
long-term predictions) and of the structural complexity of the object
(which cannot be adequately described by scientific methods) have
come to influence the natural sciences and have initiated a science of
chaos, which, as a matter of course, has also influenced art and art
theory (see Gleick). Barth has written a series of essays on
“Postmodernism, Chaos Theory, and the Romantic Arabesque”
(1995, 275-327) to which we will refer to in a number of cases. In
contrast to the modernist intention to reveal in the wholeness of form
the coherence behind fragmentation and chaos, the purpose of
postmodern form/anti-form is not the interpretation of the world (and
the failure of interpretation, together with the alienation of the
experiencing subject) but the assessment of, and the playing with, its
non-interpretability. The siding with non-interpretation in the
dialectic of interpretability and non-interpretability that determines
human relations to reality and history in their variety and
ambivalence, is so important for the postmodern writers and critics
that almost all of them directly state their convictions along these
lines in interviews, essays or fictional texts. A selection of statements
gives us access to the theoretical positions underlying postmodern
fiction, now seen from the side of the authors, who also raise the
issue of the end of art.
In Sukenick’s words, the new tradition in fiction, “has [...] no
‘meaning.’ It resists interpretation” (1975b, 43-44); and it does so
because, in Gass’s words from The Tunnel, “there was no world
around our weary ears, only meaning; we were being stifled by
significance” (343). In a similar vein, Gass says in an interview,
“interpretation is a violation. You don’t say to the work, ‘What do
you mean?’” (Ziegler and Bigsby 163), but on another occasion he
specifies the dilemma that the text-reader relationship creates: “You
can’t force interpretations and you can’t prevent them” (LeClair and
McCaffery l64). Barthelme notes in “The Balloon”, “we have learned
not to insist on meanings, and they are rarely even looked for now”
30 From Modernism to Postmodernism

(UP 16); as Coover says: “There are always other plots, other
settings, other interpretations” (LeClair and McCaffery 68). The
value of the text lies, in Federman’s words, in its participation in a
“delightful culture of irrationality”. The New Fiction offers “other
alternatives”, reinvents “the world for us”, and is “nonfunctional”.
In fact, the novel “gradually loses its function in relation to society”
(LeClair and McCaffery 138-139) because of the encroachment of
other media. In William Gass’s words (which reflect also Robbe-
Grillet’s position), the postmodern text even rejects the notion of
“relevance”: “Relevance is meaningless to it [art] [...] works of art
must be relevant by being [...] I feel no pressure to be relevant”
(Bellamy 1974, 40-41). Susan Sontag, one of the first critics to
support the New Fiction, argues against “the project of
interpretation” which she considers “stifling” because “the merit of
these works lies certainly elsewhere than in their ‘meanings’” (7, 9).
She notes that “a great deal of today’s art may be understood as
motivated by a flight from interpretation. To avoid interpretation, art
may become parody. Or it may become abstract. Or it may become
(‘merely’) decorative. Or it may become non-art” (10); art employs
“techniques that would fragment, dissociate, alienate, break up”
(200). Indeed, the anti-representational, self-reflexive postmodern
narrative “systematically sets out to short-circuit traditional
interpretive temptations” (Jameson 1987, 219).4 The question of in-
terpretation and interpretability leads directly to questions of com-
position, of the condition of the created worlds, of their situ-
ationalism, which is not only the formative matrix of fiction and the
visual arts but also the fundamental condition in culture, and the
basis of analysis in psychology, and sociology.
This book will attempt to cover the full range of postmodern
American fiction and analyze it under as many frames of reference as
possible. Every chapter will have a philosophical/theoretical
introduction into the subject treated (i.e., the aesthetics of art and of
the environment, the aesthetic attitude, space, time, character, the
fantastic, imagination, etc.). The introductory remarks also comprise
general aesthetic considerations — for instance about notions like
form and force, the symbol, negation, etc. — and comparisons
between modernism and postmodernism. Generous reference will be
made to concrete examples from fictional texts. Analyses of
exemplary narratives, as well as the writers’ own statements about
Introduction: Methods of Approach 31

their aims and methods, the contexts they work in, and the state of
literature in their time, serve to illustrate our argument in its various
phases. Statements cited from critics about postmodernism and
postmodern fiction will date preferably from the Sixties, Seventies,
and Eighties when the process of evaluation was in full flux but
include later utterances if they clarify the situation, as for instance
Barth’s collection of essays, Further Fridays (1995) or Gass’s
Finding a Form (1996). As mentioned, the more than fifty texts by
more than fifteen postmodern writers to which we refer will be taken
mostly from the Sixties and Seventies. Since cultural critics differ
widely in the description of the decisive features of postmodernism
and the assessment of its significance, we will begin, as mentioned,
with a general overview of concepts and definitions of the
postmodern era, as well as the placement of postmodern fiction in the
socio-cultural context of its time and the consideration of its national
and transnational features.
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2. Postmodern Culture, Aesthetics, and the Arts

2.1. Definitions and Conceptions of Postmodernism

Historically, postmodernism as an important category


evolves from the Sixties, though, as mentioned, the term has been
used a number of times before, mostly with regard to the crisis of
civilization (see Köhler for details). The Sixties have been called
“our most explosive decade”, a time of turmoil, of “an experiment in
political theatre” (Dickstein 23), a time “of enormous hope, idealism,
energy, creativity, overreaching, arrogance and sheer folly” (Howard
xiv). It gave birth to radical political, social, and cultural movements
whose watchword was liberation, liberation from intellectual, social,
and sexual restraints. But it is obviously a period that is not
susceptible to any kind of easy summary. For those who followed
both the “quest for social justice” and “the search for personal
authenticity” (Howard 20), it was not easy to combine the personal
and the social. In view of the modish cult that defined the language
of liberation, it was difficult to distinguish between “apparent
freedom” (Marcuse) and real freedom, “between the authentic and
the ephemeral, the genuinely revolutionary and the merely self-
indulgent, the hard-won insight and the borrowed attitude” (Howard
17). This made for confusions, contradictions, and collisions of
thoughts and feelings, which finally got out of control when the sense
of frustration, of unrealized hopes got the upper hand. Gass notes
another effect of the Sixties: “Because the Sixties didn’t permanently
alter the nature of man, life, and state, the seventies were sullen”
(1985, 189).
In the continuum between culture and art, fiction in the
Sixties confirms both the liberating and the deconstructive drives in
culture, not, however, by reflecting lifestyle, civil rights movements,
or new politics, but by an exuberant creation of new work, a playful
and ironic attitude, and a decomposition of its own traditional logic
of cohesion and integration. Postmodern fiction joins the rebellion
against the Fifties and late modernism in its own way by turning
against the three pillars of modern art, the concepts of reality,
identity and totalizing artistic form, and by developing its own
“imagined alternatives” (Goodman). It was the deconstruction of
“traditional loyalties, ties and associations” (Howe 426), the ex-
34 From Modernism to Postmodernism

perience of a sharpened sense of new possibility and diversity, and


the willingness to experiment, rethink, and redefine, that caused what
has been called “a revolutionary explosion of the arts” (Howard 267).
Donald Barthelme notes: “There seems to be considerable energy in
American writing at the moment; it seems a fruitful time” (LeClair
and McCaffery 43). Robert Coover, looking back, speaks of the
exciting phase of the Sixties and the Seventies, “when writing in the
Americas seemed to be enjoying such a renaissance” (LeClair and
McCaffery 65); he recognizes a “general awareness, by writers of
both North and South America, that we have come to the end of a
tradition, [...] that our ways of looking at the world and of adjusting
to it through fictions are changing. The New World is peculiarly alert
to this” (Gado 142). John Barth notes that he and his colleagues
“have followed out certain currents in their own thinking”, that
“[c]ertain sensitivities have been sharpened” (Gado 123, 130). The
sharpened sensitivity turns against the simplifications of society, it
takes note of the fact that, as Federman puts it, the “world, as we
received it [...], what Sartre used to call the Age of Reason, was all
spoiled, saturated with crap [...]. It looked dead” (LeClair and
McCaffery 138). Gass makes the tension between society and art a
fundamental one: “Naturally the artist is an enemy of the state. He
cannot play politics, succumb to slogans and other simplifications
[...] He is also an enemy of every ordinary revolution. As a man he
may long for action; he may feel injustice like a burn; and certainly
he may speak out. But the tornup street is too simple for him when he
sculpts or paints. He undermines everything [...] he cannot simplify,
he cannot overlook, he cannot forget, omit, or falsify. [...] The artist’s
revolutionary activity is of a different kind. He is concerned with
consciousness, and he makes his changes there” (1970, 288-89).
The Sixties turned into major trends what had before been
minor currents of resistance. Norman Mailer wrote in “The White
Negro”: “these have been the years of conformity and depression. A
stench of fear has come out of every pore of American life, and we
suffer from a collective failure of nerve” (243). “One could hardly
maintain the courage to be individual, to speak with one’s own voice,
for the years in which one could complacently accept oneself as part
of an élite by being a radical were forever gone” (242-43). This time
has experienced “a slow death by conformity with every creative and
rebellious instinct stifled”. Yet his solution conforms to the
Postmodern Culture, Aesthetics, and the Arts 35

intellectual climate of the time by being personal: Mailer discovered


“the American existentialist” (243), an ideal that is not quite the one
of the liberating movements of the Sixties (which also liberated the
arts from the modernist cult of alienation). The new trends challenge
the innovative artistic imagination to establish new contents and new
forms.
Though postmodernism evolves out of a the specific
condition of the sixties, it reaches beyond the sixties and becomes the
signum of a whole era and its social and cultural trends. The prefix
“post-” offers a first approach to the phenomenon postmodernism as
a socio-cultural category: it marks both its deconstructive and
reconstructive aspects. Though there are early uses of the terms
postmodern and postmodernism,5 mostly pointing to the darker sides
of civilization, we shall here concentrate on its meaning from the
Fifties on. What Lyotard called the “postmodern condition” of our
media, consumer and market society, however, has not just one
name, i.e., postmodern and its linguistic derivations. The multiplying
energy of the time also overwhelms the naming of the post-
phenomenon. The proliferation of designations may diffuse the
contours of postmodernism, but it also indicates the wide spread of
the post-situation into all spheres of life. Our time or, rather, the
period up to the end of the Eighties, has not only been called
postmodern, but also post-social, post-historical, post-ideological,
post-utopian, post-political, post-fascist, post-aesthetic, post-
development, post-revolutionary, post-colonial, post-industrial, post-
cultural, post-metaphysical, post-humanist, post-human, post-
existential, post-absurd, post-male, post-white, post-heroic, post-
philosophical, post-avantgarde, post-innovation, post-mimetic, post-
Protestant, post-Marxist, post-Americanist, post-contemporary, etc.
All these terms attest to a sense of immanence, to the fact that the
dominance of meta-discourses has come to an end, that something
new has occurred but is finding it difficult to crystallize into a
definable entity of its own. Unity is here multiplicity, an energetic
“unitas multiplex”, a unity of collage without hierarchy. Pluralism is
the catchword, pluralism of viewpoints and definitions.
Postmodernism is not a stable entity but changes in time.
Among the criteria applied to it are anti-modernism, an anything-
goes attitude, and pluralism. The debate about postmodernism re-
veals a kind of “logical” development. According to Hans Bertens, at
36 From Modernism to Postmodernism

the beginning the newness of the term and the insecurity as to its
scope and meaning were suggested by the use of a hyphen (post-
modern) and of quotation marks (“postmodern”). The term was used
in architecture and literature to describe a new, anti-modern
sensibility and style (Susan Sontag, Leslie Fiedler). In the second
stage, at the end of the Sixties, an attempt was made to define
postmodernism more rigorously as an overall cultural, social, and
political phenomenon and to characterize it, in contrast to an
allegedly exhausted and surpassed modernism, as a new stage of
human culture and civilization (Hassan). While for instance
modernism is defined by rationality, transcendence, continuity, and
depth, postmodernism is said to be characterized by irrationality,
immanence, discontinuity or difference, and surface. Not all attempts
to define the postmodern era were in favor of it, and the discussion
between supporters of the new lifeworld’s concepts and aesthetics
and their despisers were often vociferous (Newman). They created an
aesthetics-versus-ethics debate, the negative voices accusing
postmodernism of substituting aesthetics for ethics, which allegedly
leads to an indifferent and therefore irresponsible “anything-goes”
attitude (Feyerabend). The Marxist Frederic Jameson describes
postmodern culture as a condition arising out of late capitalism and
calls it rather pointedly an “absolute and absolutely random pluralism
[...] a coexistence not even of multiple and alternate worlds so much
as of unrelated fuzzy sets and semiautonomous subsystems” (1992,
372). Stephen Best and Douglas Kellner, on the other hand, see in the
“postmodern emphasis on disintegration and change” chances for
“new openings and possibilities for social transformation and
struggle”, a way toward “a more diverse, open and contextual politics
that refuses to privilege any general recipes for social change or any
particular group” (28).
This characterizes already the third stage of
conceptualization, the re-politicization of postmodernism in the mid-
l980s. The broad acceptance of the term since the end of the
Seventies gave it more weight and brought into the debate the
participation of new groups, interests, and ideologies and signified an
inclusion of the democratizing tendencies of the Sixties. Marxists,
feminists, and ethnic groups that had at first shown the cold shoulder
to a seemingly “anything-goes” consumer and media culture and a
deconstructionist theory that seemed to define postmodernism —
Postmodern Culture, Aesthetics, and the Arts 37

from their reform point of view — only in negative terms entered the
field and provided more socially critical views along the lines of
gender, race, and class. Ethnic literature now entered the stage of
postmodernism with, for instance, the African-American author
Ishmael Reed (Mumbo Jumbo) and the Native American novelist
Gerald Vizenor (Griever: An American Monkey King in China). In
the course of the debate the concept of postmodernism split. A
“good” postmodernism, fostering pluralism, the respect for
difference and otherness, was contrasted to a “bad” postmodernism
that promoted the allegedly anything-goes attitude of indifference
and mere consumption. Though the term gained its greatest
popularity in the late Eighties and still showed great vitality at the
beginning of the nineties, one might argue, as already mentioned,
that, at least in the definition of the intellectual climate, it had worn
itself out by l989, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the breakdown of
state socialism in Eastern Europe, the end of the Cold War, the
shifting of political, social, economic and cultural realities, and the
beginning of an era of new assumptions, needs and obligations that
were no longer subsumable under the concept of postmodernism. Yet
there is a lot of confusion in the use of the term and the analysis of
the current condition, and one cannot but recognize that the
postmodern culture of consumption, of the media and the spectacle
continues to determine the contemporary world still at the beginning
of the millennium.
The definitions of postmodernism come to differ according
to the principles of inclusion or exclusion, affirmation or resistance,
mainstream or opposition, deconstruction or reconstruction. The
following list may exemplify in more detail the various approaches to
postmodernism and the ways they complement and contradict each
other, but also give an impression of the difficulties involved in the
attempt to render the term meaningful not only for one field of
activity but for the social, cultural and artistic aspects of society in
general.6 (1) The realm of aesthetics, art, and textuality dominated the
discussion up to the late Seventies; postmodern art is seen to be
“purified”, i.e., cleansed from such totalizing concepts as “reality”,
“truth”, “logic”, “meaning”, and interpretation in favor of the
imaginary, the self-reflexive, the incoherent, the discontinuous, and
the immanent (Fiedler, Sontag, Hassan). (2) An existentialist
postmodernism (Spanos, Palmer), claims that “the postmodern
38 From Modernism to Postmodernism

imagination [...] is an existential imagination”, and that, by an


“aesthetic of decomposition”, it exposes “the primordial not-at-home,
where dread, as Kierkegaard and Heidegger and Sartre and Tillich
tell us, becomes not just the agency of despair but also and
simultaneously of hope, that is, of freedom and infinite
possibility”(Spanos 1972, 148, l56). This is a concept of postmodern
art that stands in contrast to the later dominant idea of textuality, to
the surrender of reality to language current in poststructuralism. (3)
Partly connected with existentialist postmodernism is a
postmodernism of immediacy, energy, and performance art
(Benamou, Paoletti), in which “the artist as shaman becomes a
conductor of forces which go far beyond those of his own person,
and is able to bring art in touch with its sacred sources” (Gablik 126),
for instance in the performances and assemblages of Joseph Beuys,
who conceives of the artist as shaman, it finds another place of
intensity in the theatre, inspired by Artaud (Schechner, Blau).
(4) There is then the inclusive postmodernism of hybridity,
which does not so much aim at intensities but at expansion,
combination of styles. In fiction it connects various strategies,
narration, reflection, representation, interrelated by the postmodern
irony of form, or in what Alan Wilde calls “mid-fiction” (1976, 47),
a fiction that “manages to combine the problematic and the
assentive” and to connect “the oppositional extremes of realism and
reflexivity” in a kind of pluriform (1982, 182, 192); hybridity is
especially striking in postmodern architecture, which breaks most
radically with modern concepts and forms, and, according to Venturi,
is characterized by elements that “are hybrid rather than ‘pure,’
compromising rather than ‘clean,’ distorted rather than
‘straightforward’ [...] I am for messy vitality over obvious unity”
(16). The arts employ the strategies of parody (Barth) and pastiche,
i.e., “blank parody”, with “nothing but stylistic diversity and
heterogeneity”, in Jameson’s critical phrasing (1983, 114), and with
“palimpsest”, i.e. the superimposition, for instance in architecture, of
past forms upon each other. (5) The concept of “double coding” that
Jencks advanced is based on the hybridity of form. It allows for
different kinds of reception according to the standard of information,
insight and (professional) interest the viewer has; it extends “the
language of architecture in many different ways — into the vern-
acular, towards tradition and the commercial slang of the street.
Postmodern Culture, Aesthetics, and the Arts 39

Hence the double coding, the architecture which speaks to the elite
and the man on the street” (8); the concept of double coding in the
general sense of double focus becomes one of the most popular ideas
in the analysis of postmodernism, for instance in literature and
popular culture (Hutcheon, Collins).
(6) The deconstructive features, especially of aesthetic
postmodernism, received a philosophical underpinning by the
poststructuralist philosophies of deconstruction, resistance, and
difference that gave language central place, dissolved the subject,
and attacked representation, wholeness and (terroristic) reason,
advancing at the same time diversity, uncertainty, undecidability, and
dissemination of meaning; poststructuralism came to be regarded (in
the early Eighties) as the philosophic version of postmodernism
though there are important differences (Barthes, Baudrillard, Deleuze
and Guattari, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Lyotard). (7) Lyotard‘s
“postmodern sublime” turns against the “cynical eclecticism” of
much of postmodern art (this would include Jencks’s and Venturi’s
postmodern concepts of architecture) and demands that art concern
itself with the unpresentable, distinguishing the jubilation, free
experimentation, and anti-representationalism of the postmodern
sublime from the modern nostalgic sublime that still represents
alienation and offers “the solace of good forms”(1984c, 340). (8) In
contrast to the exclusive intention of Lyotard’s elitist concept of the
postmodern sublime, the inclusive viewpoint finds a subversive
potential also in popular (and mass) culture (Collins, Wyver); or it
sees in postmodern culture — in opposition to what Bauman calls the
“crisis theorists” (for whom “the identity of present-day society is
fully negative”) and their cry against the threat of deadening
uniformity — a plurality of choice, for “[t]he market thrives on
variety; so does consumer freedom and with it the security of the
system” (Bauman 47, 52).
(9) The “crisis theorists” come from the leftist and Marxist
camp and often take up ideas from the post-Marxist,
deconstructionist philosophy of the poststructuralists though their
aim is cultural criticism in more concrete terms. In the early Eighties
they join the debate, which was first dominated by the anti-consensus
and pro-difference attitude of the poststructuralists, and direct their
harsh criticism against the mainstream culture, which they see as an
outgrowth of late capitalism and the marketplace, i.e. the “anything-
40 From Modernism to Postmodernism

goes” attitude of irresponsible consumerism (Jameson). Though the


neo-Marxists and the poststructuralists more or less could agree on
the negative evaluation of the mainstream, their recommended
countermoves are quite different. (10) To take two radically different
viewpoints (which however meet in the preference for what Lyotard
called “little narratives” over the “grand narratives” of
emancipation): while Habermas — believing in universal reason and
the necessity of promoting further the project of modernism —
criticizes the increased penetration of the social world by mere
“standards of economic and administrative rationality” and demands
a “communicative rationality” (on a local basis) for the solution of
social problems (1981, 7-8), the poststructuralists, conversely — as
countermoves both to the rigidities of instrumental rationality and
Habermas’s philosophy of consensus — turn the other way and
propagate, of course in various ways, radical politics of resistance,
nomadism and movement, and the perpetuation of dissensus
(Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Foucault). (11) Out of the
criticism of postmodern culture at large, the devaluation of the
mainstream, developed a support of marginality and otherness that
spread over almost all camps, especially the leftist cultural critique,
and favored an increasing climate of tolerance and the respect of
differences, of ethnicity, gender, or sexual preference (Lipsitz,
Jameson). Todd Gitlin notes that postmodern politics is a “politics of
limits”. It “respects horizontal social relations —multiplicity over
hierarchy, juxtaposition over usurpation, difference over deference”
(359). Yet the contrary is also true. Jameson claims that
postmodernism allows no genuine politics, while older politics
“sought to coordinate local and global struggles” (1992, 330); and
Sabina Lovibond, accusing postmodernism of abandoning the
modern project of Enlightenment and its belief in progress and
reason, warns that “postmodernism represents a dangerous approach
for any marginalized group to adopt” (160).
(12) Baudrillard is an extreme case of the “crisis theorists”.
Because he combines social criticism with criticism of the media and
goes to (and beyond) the limit of the argument, he had in the Eighties
a great influence in the American scene, also on Jameson and quite
generally on media criticism. He may serve us here to document the
ultimate disenchantment with the concepts of enlightenment, though
much remains unexplained, willful, and irrational in his discussion.
Postmodern Culture, Aesthetics, and the Arts 41

His fierce analysis and apocalyptic criticism of the postmodern


condition — proposing that a new stage in history has arrived in
which codes and signs have become the primary reality — reduces
all differences to the differences of signs, suggesting that “the system
of consumption is based on a code of signs (objects/signs) and
differences, and not on need and pleasure” (Baudrillard 1988b, 44).
Generalizing his sign theory, he claims that in a society dominated by
the media and their images, the social reality, even power and
politics, are replaced by the hyper-reality of mere simulacra, so that
“[t]he process of signification is, at bottom, nothing but a gigantic
simulation model of meaning” (Baudrillard 1988b, 91); in fact, “we
must think of the media as if they were, in outer orbit, a sort of
genetic code which controls the mutation of the real into the hyper
real” (1983b, 55), a hyperreal which we can neither conceptualize
nor control. Here the cultural and the economic have become
exchangeable; the social has disappeared. From a point of view that
is based on what Baudrillard calls in the title of an article “The
Implosion of Meaning in the Media” (1983a) and that totalizes the
sign’s control over reality, he can argue that criticism is of no use,
that the criticizer of society and the criticized are leveled in status
because of their “false” picture of reality, their common “Western
rationalism”, and utilitarianism. Leaving his own Marxism behind,
he can therefore maintain that “Marxism is only the disenchanted
horizon of capital” (l975, 60). In his relentless and brutally
overstated view, “[p]ostmodernity [...] is a game with the vestiges of
what has been destroyed. This is why we are ‘post’ —history has
stopped, one is in a kind of post-history which is without meaning”
(Baudrillard 1984, 19).7
These differing views indicate that postmodernism is not to
be understood in the singular but in the plural. As already mentioned,
there are at least three areas that the term designates, postmodern
culture at large, postmodern theory (the term theory replacing the
allegedly outmoded concept of philosophy which is contested as
discipline and institution because of its traditional concern with
structure, center and wholeness), and postmodern art and literature.
The first kind, postmodern culture, has not aged at all; quite on the
contrary, it has expanded, but not as a unified entity. In accordance
with the trends towards decentralism in a “disorganized society”
where order is at best “local, emergent and transitory” (Bauman 47,
42 From Modernism to Postmodernism

l89), culture is pluralized, too, is divided and dissected, the parts and
subcultures relating with one another only in a “flexible
accumulation” (D. Harvey l71).The second field, theory with its
utopian ideas and prophetic visions, has aged most, and this might
include at least the radical forms of deconstructionism and the
Marxist criticism of the System. The third area, literature, music, and
the visual arts, differ in their development and their postmodern
characteristics, as we will see later, but the experimental arts in all
their (complex) forms have kept to their age-old function to tell the
truth(s) by both reflecting/confirming the trends of the times and
subverting them, marking their deficits in knowledge and
understanding — however the prerequisites, concepts and strategies
of art may have changed — and in the process now going to
extremes of excess, to the point of self-deconstruction.
For all three areas of postmodernism the perspectives of time
and history are important and make for another three variations or
aspects for each of the three. This has to do with the fact that all
designations of periods and intellectual areas, both “the Sixties” and
postmodernism, are mental constructs serving heuristic purposes,
establishing what Luhmann calls “systems of differentiation”, whose
categories do not describe the things as they are but to whose
discerning constructions the things “answer” in intelligible (or non-
intelligible), always plural ways. The status of betweenness is
crucial, the betweenness of the designated world between the one
reality characterized and its multiplication and deconstruction. These
systems of differentiation and their categories operate on various
levels of abstraction. First, the spirit of a time, as Borges knew, looks
for forerunners and extends the historical scale in order to increase its
weight. Postmodern deconstructionism have claimed as forefathers
Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, Heidegger, Wittgenstein among the
philosophers and theorists; Joyce, Kafka, Faulkner or Poe as “proto-
postmodernist “(Barth 1995, 291) among the literary authors; Dada
and Surrealism among the artistic movements. Second,
postmodernism has been considered a kind of (deconstructive)
sensibility, a cyclical phenomenon, which, since history is not only a
uni-linear process but also a repetition of anthropological constants,
of basic attitudes, can be found in all or at least in many eras —
though in different historical constellations and under various
dominants. One may then reveal postmodern traits in de Sade,
Postmodern Culture, Aesthetics, and the Arts 43

Montaigne, Cervantes or Shakespeare, and a host of other writers,


even in the Middle Kingdom in Egypt or the Roman Silver Age
(McEvilly). Third, one may come finally to the paradoxical
conclusion that, in Lyotard’s words, postmodernism is not
“modernism at its end but in the nascent state”, i.e., it signifies the
deconstructive phase of openness, fluidity, and indeterminacy before
reorganization and consistency set in (1984c, 79).
Already in the Fifties the first postmodern novels appear.
Written in an anticipatory spirit, they break up traditional schemes of
representation and evaluation, what Charles Olson, the Black
Mountain poet and one of the first promoters of postmodernism in
literature, already in l951 called the “old controlling humanism” (5).
Hawkes’s The Cannibal, actually the first postmodern novel, appears
in 1949, Gaddis’s The Recognitions in 1955, William Burroughs’s
solipsistic Naked Lunch in 1959, his cut-up novel The Exterminators
(written with Brian Gyson) in 1960, and Joseph Heller’s seminal
Catch 22 in 1961. They all recognize and make use of the productive
potential that lies in the “gaps of power”, the “power vacuum”
(McElroy 12,15) between deconstruction and reconstruction. The
transformation of both the political and the cultural scene in the
Sixties — the rebellion against the bourgeois, morally austere,
tranquillized Fifties, their social decorum and conceptual schemes —
is fueled by energy, intensity, and free form (cf. Dickstein). All three
characterize also postmodernism and the postmodern arts.
Postmodern fiction heralds energy, free form, and intensity.
As always the relationship between the arts and the socio-
cultural condition is complex because art and artistic self-reflection
both confirm and subvert the trends of the times. Gass remarked that
the new fiction is new not by joining the “movement” but by
changing consciousness, by promoting radical artistic innovation, by
the intensification of irony as attitude and form, by the aesthetic of
montage and collage, by an accentuation of both form (Sontag) and
anti-form (Fiedler, Hassan) in a paradoxical process of exhaustion
and replenishment. Postmodern fiction reflects and confirms the
surface orientation of the contemporary general culture by rejecting
the essentialism of self and form, as well as the “strong” meta-
concepts of rational order, continuity, causality, teleology, and
wholeness, and the general depth orientation of romantic and modern
art, and instead keeping to the surface of character and plot and the
44 From Modernism to Postmodernism

situational context. Yet while art confirms the revolutionary trends of


culture, it at the same time subverts, and that in two ways. First, the
coolly distant and ironic attitude of the arts contradicts the idealism,
political engagement, and self-indulgence of the Sixties; these
cultural trends are parried with the sense of the spiritual vacancy in
all the feverish activities, in the infinite expectations, the accelerated
and multiplied “advances”, the revolutionary fervor. The freedom of
the imagination is set against the perception of failed promises, and
missed opportunities, of resentfulness and confusion, the lack of
problem-solving. Yet the subversive spirit has also more specific,
aesthetic targets. It manifests itself aesthetically (a) in the ironic
relation of art to the affirmative aesthetic of the cultural environment,
and (b) in the deconstruction of the modern ideology of totalizing
form. The disruptive force of the individual text now allows no
position to stand, reveals the immanent contradictions of theory and
practice, and rebels against meaning, interpretation, and the concepts
of art in general. Though this experimentalism is political by its
subversive potential, and though the artist “views the transactions of
life through a lens of concept” (Gass 1970, 62), postmodern art does
not aim at a change of politics. Ginsberg’s call for “magic politics”, a
kind of “poetry and theater, sublime enough to change the national
will and open the consciousness in the populace” (qtd. in Dickstein
22), is a fanciful illusion. Robbe-Grillet, Mailer, Susan Sontag,
Barthelme, Gass, and many others — in a continuation of modern
tenets — emphasized the autonomy of art. They maintained, in
Robbe-Grillet’s succinct formulation: “[i]f art is anything, it is
everything; in which case it must be self-sufficient, and there can be
nothing beyond it” (qtd. in Sontag 28).
In a turn against modernism the particular narrative is no
longer seen to be the transformation of an aesthetic deep structure or
an essence, the universal essence of human narrativity (Lévi-Strauss),
nor of a universal system with “distinguishable regularities” that lead
to the construction of a “narrative grammar” (Greimas). It does not
have “a geometry of [its] own” (H. James 1921, x), does not consist
of a “logical relation” of “successive events” in a “causal” narrative
“chain” (Bal 102-104). Narrative no longer creates links between the
known and the unknown by providing ideas of beginning and end,
conflict and reconciliation, quest and conclusion, by connecting
decay and renewal, despair and hope. Foregrounded are “hybridity,
Postmodern Culture, Aesthetics, and the Arts 45

impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and


unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics,
movies, songs” (Rushdie 4). Under these circumstances, in Gass’s
words, “collage is the blessed method. [...] It works wonders, because
in collage logical levels rise and fall like waves” (1979, 282). For
Barth, the image of the wave is a central metaphor for the
characterization of life, the story, and the narrative process in general
(see below).

2.2. Aesthetics of Art vs. Aesthetics of the Environment

In postmodern culture the difference between civilization


(utility values) and culture (highest goals of the human mind) is
dissolved, and the borderlines between what used to be called high
culture and low or popular culture are blurred. But conversely, these
boundaries are also reasserted, and that more than ever before. There
are two contrary developments that demonstrate that the
circumference of the postmodern sphere of art is always changing
and dynamically related to historical developments, to shifts in the
structure of society and the cultural field. On the one hand, the
aesthetic contracts into the elitist complexity of high art. Against the
certainties of culture it sets uncertainty and self-reflexivity in a
pluralism of perspectives and narrative means, giving “overt
expression to its motive, provid[ing] its own evaluation” (Gass 1970,
109); it actually creates such a maze of a network, that the
appreciation of its “irrealism” (Barth) presupposes a high level of 41
information and cultural knowledge, and limits its effect of resistance
to the socio-cultural system it works in (Barth, Barthelme, Coover,
Elkin, Gaddis, Gass, Hawkes, Pynchon). On the other hand,
aesthetics expands and reaches beyond the autonomy and cognitive
stance of art, extending into what one might call, in contrast to the
aesthetic of art, of the art system, the aesthetic of the environment8 or
the cultural field, which includes popular culture, decoration, design,
lifestyle. The environmental or cultural aesthetic, as it were, recurs to
a more vague and inclusive, in fact pre-modern notion of aesthetics
that includes entertainment and didactics without excluding form.
This development signals a widening of our “sensibility to the
possibility within the notion of aesthetics” (Diffey 10); it incites the
re-inclusion into aesthetics, for instance, of the “urge [of people] to
46 From Modernism to Postmodernism

render the world around them an aesthetically pleasing one” (Zuniga


43).
All this complicates the status of art in a cultural field that is
de-hierarchized, but still has its rules and directives. They fill in the
blanks and narrow choices, and decide and define and may call into
question the values of intrinsic aesthetic uniqueness, which used to
give art its cultural validation but by now is perhaps rated as
superfluous or too “heavy” and complicated; it is an innovative
aesthetic uniqueness attained by reckless honesty and an
experimental design, in which “every element [is] related, every
relation enriched, every meaning multiplied, every thought or
sensation [...] every desire or revelation, every passion, precisely
defined and pushed to its finest and fullest expression”, and, one
might add, pushed to its limit (Gass 1985, 202). The paradoxical
dialectic of art between cultural confirmation (of energy, intensity
and free form) and cultural subversion (of simplifications, slogans,
political illusions) that characterizes postmodern fiction and also the
individual text repeats itself in the relationship between the aesthetic
of art and the aesthetic of the environment. The aesthetic text is
generally subversive in its assumptions and its conceptual system of
considerable complexity, while the aesthetic products from the
general cultural store, on the contrary, are affirmative and
pleasurable. As mentioned, postmodern art and postmodern culture in
general share the liberation from intellectual, social and cultural
constraints, and they also have in common the central maxim that
evolves out of this broadening of possibilities, namely pluralism
(including relativism and perspectivism). But aesthetic pluralism in
art is quite different from aesthetic pluralism in the cultural field. In
the former it is epistemologically grounded, is based on the rivalry
between material and design, and leads to a multiplication of
aesthetic entities; in the latter pluralism derives from a loss of social
coherence, from “multiculturalism” in a most general sense, from a
desire for variety and change, and the power of the marketplace.
Art and the marketplace have always constituted a subtle
symbiosis. But the market has now undergone a process of eman-
cipation from the dictates of art. The result is that art, in order to be
marketable, needs a formula (Pop art, minimalism, constructionist
art, new expressionism, and so on); and the market requires that this
formula be subject to modish change. As to verbal art, the might of
Postmodern Culture, Aesthetics, and the Arts 47

the market forces authors, publishers and distributors to serve the


penchant of the audience for entertainment, and, together with the
preponderance of the electronic media, it forces experimental
literature — which uses its complexity, its “thickness”, intensity and
focus (Gass), against easy consumability by the reader — to a place
on the margin, without, however, being able to remove its prestige, at
least in academic circles, though its pretensions are now more
modest than those of its modern predecessors. Gass in an essay about
“Pulitzer: The People’s Prize” writes: “The Pulitzer has perceived an
important truth about our complex culture: Serious literature is not
important to it; however, the myth must be maintained. Ceremony is
essential”. Facing the “discrepancy between the acknowledged
importance of our literature to our culture and the pitiful public
support it gets” (1996,10), Gass expounds the reasons, why “works
of art [are] so socially important”, not “for the messages they may
contain [...] but because they insist more than most on their own
reality; because of the absolute way they exist”, because of their
“honesty”, their “presence” or “concentration”, their “awareness”
and “unity of being”, because of the way they “confront us [...]
completely, openly, at once” (1970, 282- 83, 86-87). This is an
assessment of art’s merit as construction of undeceiving experience
that would be shared by most of the postmodern writers, and that also
reveals, in spite of all the changes in the cultural and artistic climate,
the continuity between aesthetic modernism and postmodernism in
their appraisal of art’s autonomy and its function of revealing the
social deficits of knowledge and understanding, hereby stressing the
fragility, the framing, and the distortion of knowledge, the
importance and limitation of point of view, and the multiplicity of
every word and sentence.
While pluralism in the arts is a pluralism generated by
uncertainty and honesty, pluralism in the multi-layered and decen-
tered cultural environment is a pluralism of functions. The variety of
cultural offers, i.e., decoration, museum artifacts, shows and
spectacles, formulaic fiction, film or TV series, serves to satisfy the
needs and interests of various social groups of the population,
defined by age, education, or profession. The overall function of
cultural aesthetics and its popular commercial forms wavers between
entertainment and cognition, emphasizing the former, but hardly ever
excluding the latter. Both entertainment and cognition combine to
48 From Modernism to Postmodernism

avoid entropy in a society that has more and more leisure, the
meaning of entropy here being boredom. The struggle between the
satisfaction of the audience with what it is used to, the conventional,
and its dissatisfaction with mere repetition and the familiar explains
the central paradox of the aesthetic of the environment or cultural
aesthetics: the ineluctable interrelation of sameness and difference,
seeming and being. The breakdown of regional and national barriers,
the availability of easy mobility and communication, the progress of
technology, and the commercialization of social and cultural life
foster sameness, while tedium and weariness ask for stimulation of
body, soul, and mind by the new and the different. The desire for
diversity and change is gratified by the conflicting energies of the
cultural scene, a pluralization of the cultural menu in general, the
simultaneous offer of different “events”, stagings, shows, programs,
ideas, subcultures and leisure-time occupations of all sorts. The
double coding of the cultural field in terms of sameness and
difference affects all cultural products, including ethics, beliefs,
living conditions, the arts, and also the postmodern novel. The result
of all this is that “strong” political or ethical ideas lose in power, and
pluralistic culture gains in weight. What we have now is a “cultural
society”. Society is to be understood “by aligning it not with self-
consciously held political ideologies, but with large cultural systems”
(D. Harvey 291). The attitude of consumerism in an affluent society
has strengthened the power of the cultural market and the cultural
institutions and has brought about a wide spectrum of cultural
contents and forms. In our “society of the spectacle” (Debord),
history is just an image, an event, a spectacle, an endless reserve of
equal events for diverse cultural tastes, for a collage of current uses
to be (re-) produced at will. This tendency towards the spectacle has
produced a specific postmodern consciousness, a kind of museum
mentality, which is no longer, characterized by a recourse to
historical logic, to origin, chronology and causality, but by the
noncommittal simultaneity of the non-simultaneous. The arts are part
of this leveled cultural scene: they are again double-coded,
functioning under the rubrics both of diversity or difference within
the cultural menu and of resistance against it from “outside” the
conventional and well-regulated. The postmodern novel pluralizes
history, just as the museum mentality does, but the narrative
pluralization does not serve entertainment and knowledge. It
Postmodern Culture, Aesthetics, and the Arts 49

provides for the differentiation of perspectives out of epistemological


reasons, because no one perspective can represent the truth, because
there is no wholeness of vision, neither of the past, nor of the present,
nor of the future — nor of time as a whole. Feeling impaired in self-
understanding and self-placement, the human being can only protect
the self against the vagaries of the time by desperately playing with
the evolving uncertainties which open the void (Barth, The Sot-Weed
Factor; Coover, The Public Burning).
While the aesthetics of art contracts in a field of uncertainty,
cultural aesthetics expands to such an extraordinary extent that we
come to experience the world through secondary images. In fact, the
aesthetic coverage or rather transformation of the world inundates the
“real” in such a totalizing way by the sheer volume of the omni-
present, media-transmitted images, formulas, and decorative forms
that they not only enrich and decorate the world but also hamper our
direct, sensory apprehension of “reality”, whatever that may be. In
this sense one may speak of an image culture, an aestheticization of
the world, including the world of commodities. As Mike
Featherstone notes:

In this aestheticized commodity world the department stores, arcades,


trams, trains, streets and the fabric of buildings and the goods on display,
as well as the people who stroll through these spaces, summon up
halfforgotten dreams as the curiosity and memory of the stroller is fed by
the ever-changing landscape in which objects appear divorced from their
contexts and subject to mysterious connections which read on the surface
of things. The everyday life of the big cities becomes aestheticized (23).

The pluralization of aesthetics, the aestheticization of the


lifeworld and the blurring of borderlines between the aesthetic
domains have consequences for the arts. The growing influence and
power of the electronic media bring about a leveling of quality
standards; with the decline of the high status of art and its claim to
exclusiveness, a dislocation of formerly existing norms of quality
within the arts also comes to pass. A “democratization” or
pluralization of the criteria of judgment takes place. This has a
number of consequences. There is the growing sense that every
segment of society has the right to its own tastes and can choose the
ways to satisfy them, and that highbrow judgments are therefore
elitist and irrelevant. If there is no dominant aesthetic norm that
requires a certain, closely circumscribed significance of aesthetic
50 From Modernism to Postmodernism

form and is based on a hierarchy of values, the whole literary scene


and all its gradations have to be reconsidered in their shape. Anthony
Burgess then has a point, when he says that “[w]e have to judge The
Day of the Jackal or The Crash of ‘79 by standards which neglect the
Jamesian desiderata” (15); that is, we have to judge them by stan-
dards of their own, whether we like them or not. Without shared
criteria for “good” art, one can only note, as Lyotard does: “I judge,
but if I am asked by what criteria I judge, I will have no answer to
give” (Lyotard and Thébaud 15). As Umberto Eco has written:

Once upon a time there were the mass media, and they were wicked, of
course, and there was a guilty party. Then there were the virtuous voices
that accused the criminals. And Art (ah, what luck!) offered alternatives,
for those who were not the prisoners of the mass media. Well, it’s all over.
We have to start again from the beginning, asking one another what’s
going on (1986, 150).

In addition, elitist judgments seem to have become irrelevant


because at least part of the popular arts, for instance naive painting or
folk music, fulfils the most stringent aesthetic requirements of form
in their own way. Furthermore, conversely, complex modern, even
surrealist art in the museum has lost its shock value and therewith its
subversive function —a central criterion of high art. It has found a
mass audience, and, with the deprivation of its ability to subvert, has
been trivialized. This is true of modern authors, too, for instance
Hemingway and Fitzgerald. An increase of complexity seems to be
the only protection (if there is a protection) against trivialization over
time. The high complexity or complex simplicity of postmodern
fiction finds here an explanation — though it is only one explanation
among others to which we will refer later. The pluralization of
standards is repeated in the private sphere of the reader. The
knowledge has spread that not only every section of society but also
every single person has the right and even the urgent need to fulfill
his or her specific cultural wants in quite different, popular as well as
high, fields of culture simultaneously, reading with (equal) interest
and pleasure both “high” art novels and “low” science or detective
fiction, which was formerly considered “kitsch”. This is a distinction
that is modernist and has lost much of its currency. And finally, the
act of reading itself, whatever the text may be, also has a mixed
profile; it is indeed pluralistic: it includes unfocused claims, mixed
Postmodern Culture, Aesthetics, and the Arts 51

motives, differences in mood, inclination and understanding,


interrelations and crossovers between meaning and pleasure. We
shall come back to the problem of evaluation from another point of
view, i.e., the question of what is art, in the section about the
aesthetic attitude.
The abandonment or curtailment of elitist claims has
facilitated the transgression of borderlines between the art discourse
and culture at large in both directions. Kitsch is called art, and art
exploits popular culture. In crossing the borders (which are no longer
fixed borders but can be established and deconstructed at will),
aesthetic forms deriving from the popular cultural store may be
refunctioned into complex art and vice versa. Ideological barriers are
thus dissolved, but, paradoxically, are reconfirmed at the same time,
since high art and popular art have different intentions and functions.
The experimental visual arts, for instance, make use of the (in terms
of modernist art) “anti-aesthetic” aestheticization of the environment,
its images, formulas, icons, clichés, and lifestyles, as a source of
replenishment — transforming them, however, in the process. The
Pop artists of the early Sixties, painters like Warhol, Lichtenstein,
Rosenquist, and the forerunner of Pop art, Rauschenberg, employ the
clichéd promises and floating images of the cultural media, while at
the same time they ironize them. Still having a strong fine arts
tradition in America to fall back on and staying, even if precariously,
on the side of the (subversive) art system, these painters in fact triple-
code the artwork. (1) They return to “reality”, but (2) ironize this
return to a world which by now has become a product of
consumption and of the fiction-producing media, and (3)
nevertheless use this faked return for the replenishment of subject
matter and creative energy. Something similar happens to the
experimental novel, though the interaction of levels is here less
transparent, the medium of language and narrative being more
complex than the image in painting. The “New Novel”, as it has been
called, adopts the formulas of popular fiction, the fairy tale, the
western, the adventure story, the spy and the detective novel, as well
as science fiction. Their formulas of melodramatic plot, black-and-
white characterization, clear-cut moral oppositions, sentimental
feelings, and affirmative syntheses are incorporated as matrices into
the new text (e.g. Barth, Brautigan, Barthelme, Pynchon) in order to
gain a plot, to build up suspense, and to hold the attention of the
52 From Modernism to Postmodernism

reader who has been attuned to the formulaic narrative arguments by


fiction, film, and TV. At the same time, these clichéd formulas are
parodied, ironized, and mocked, for instance by reversing their pre-
designed intention and formulas and by transforming them into
complex games (the detective novel formula, for instance, does not
begin with uncertainty and end with certainty but reverses the
sequence, beginning with certainty and ending with uncertainty).
This procedure is not only a critical act but is also used to vitalize the
imagination. In a time of exhaustion and disbelief in formulas and
regulated aesthetic systems, the author, so to speak through the
backdoor, gets preformed materials and structures to work on and
play with on different levels. By the exploitation of formulaic fiction,
the aesthetic system is ironized and energized in order to avoid being
stereotyped as a (modern) self-enveloping symbolic structure. The
use of flat formulas, along with “the flattest possible characters in the
flattest possible landscape in the flattest possible diction”(Newman
156), is thus also a counter-strategy against aesthetic closure. What
we see here at work, in fiction and painting, is the aesthetic
operational paradox (vitalization of art through the flatness of
formulas), based on the paradoxical ground figuration of the
postmodern text and artwork, a paradox of which we will say more
later.
The field of art is of course plural in its discourses, forms
and functions. The interaction between the arts and the cultural
environment has a decisive influence on the respective weight and
prestige of the different media of art, all of which have their assets
and their limitations. The relations among the various art disciplines
can be hierarchical or accumulative; there are parallels and contrasts
in their formal potential and their developmental cycle. Post-
modernism effects some important changes in the respective accen-
tuation and evaluation of the various art media. Just as the field of
postmodern culture abandons its hierarchical design, the field of art
abandons its hierarchical organization. Literature loses its privileged
role in the realm of art, a dominance founded, according to Jauss, on
its “socially formative function as it competes with the other arts and
social forces in the emancipation of mankind from its natural,
religious, and social bonds” (45). Susan Sontag defines the “new
sensibility” of the Sixties as a release of the senses from the mind;
she speaks of the removal of literature, with its “heavy burden of
Postmodern Culture, Aesthetics, and the Arts 53

‘content,’ both reportage and moral judgment”, from its preeminent


place by those arts that have “much less content and a much cooler
mode of moral judgment —like music, films, dance, architecture,
painting, sculpture”, “all of which draw profoundly, naturally, and
without embarrassment, upon science and technology” (298-99). The
idea is that the talented young people turn away from the written
word and go into film, politics, music, and that, conversely, “those
who did write novels simply turned away from the gaudy carnival of
contemporary life, as Tom Wolfe said in The New Journalism, ‘gave
up by default,’ leaving the way clear for the hip new journalists and
rhetoricians. According to Wolfe, novelists became ‘Neo-Fabulists’
entranced by myth and parable understandable only to themselves,
and lost interest in reality”(Dickstein 91).
All this is true and yet not so true. Even though the
postmodern novel of the Sixties does not focus on changes in morals
and manners, and thus for some critics seems “irrelevant”, its “heavy
content” of course has also something to do with the social and
cultural condition from which it springs. One might even consider
the possibility that literature, precisely because of its “heavy burden
of content”, whatever that is in each particular case, has been less in
danger of exhaustion than have parts of the visual arts, for instance
painting and sculpture, whose formal features can be more easily
isolated and exhausted and are therefore more subject to modish
change than are those of fiction. Gass writes: “Language, unlike any
other medium, I think, is the very instrument and organ of the mind.
It is not the representation of thought, as Plato believed, and hence
only an inadequate copy; but it is thought itself. [...] Literature is
mostly made of mind; and unless that is understood about it, little is
understood about it” (1996, 36). From hindsight one recognizes that
fiction by no means was on the defensive in the culture at large in the
Sixties, that, as we will argue later, the dominance of the “less
heavy” media in fact called for a counterweight that only literature
could provide. As Dickstein notes, “the Sixties are as likely to be
remembered through novels as through anything else they left
behind” (92).
What deteriorated, however, in contrast to the novel as art,
was the prestige of the novel as medium of social criticism —
though, conversely, the prestige of the novel was used to heighten
journalistic documentation, not only later by Wolfe himself (Bonfire
54 From Modernism to Postmodernism

of the Vanities, l987), but also in the documentary novel of Truman


Capote (In Cold Blood, 1966), Norman Mailer (Armies of the Night,
1968, and several other novels), and William Styron (The
Confessions of Nat Turner, l967). Yet viewed another way, this
border crossing between novel and documentation appears to be the
attempt to revitalize the novel by including documented sociology.
The goal of this strategy, replenishment of fiction, is vaguely
comparable to the postmodern writers’ attempt at replenishment of
narrative by having recourse to popular fiction formulas. The
premises and strategies of the two groups are of course completely
different, the one turning more to “realism”, the other more to
“irrealism” (Barth) and radical formal experimentalism. Obviously,
all of these quite different assumptions about the state of the novel
and the influence of the social and cultural context on its status and
form have some validity, and none can be excluded. This is a state of
affairs that again demonstrates the complexity and uncertainty of the
situation after the exhaustion of the high modernist ideology of art.
But even the mentioned writers of documentary novels were
in fact less interested in writing good sociology than in the
psychological aspects of what happened or, rather, the complexities,
uncertainties and inexplicables of the human condition and the
mystery of the human mind and heart (as also were writers like
Bellow, Malamud, Roth and Updike). This leads in the best of the
documentary-style novels to the inclusion of certain postmodern
traits in attitude and (multi)perspective. Mailer’s Armies of the Night,
actually one of the best novels of the Sixties, is an example of how a
political event, the pacifist march on the Pentagon in l967 and the
issues involved in it, can be framed with, and complicated by, a
number of contradictory perspectives, including the epistemological
and linguistic problem of how to represent “facts”. The author, being
both a participant of the march and the narrator of the book, uses the
personal viewpoint, the problem of personal identity, the complex
web of personal relationships and entanglements, and the subtle
shades of consciousness, together with the issue of repre-sentation
(the imaginative narrative is more true than the supposedly truthful
and realistic journalistic reportage) to complicate the mere political
aspect of the march and its preparations by reflections, doubts, and
speculations. Quite generally speaking, the so-called realistic novel
was successful, even though, or perhaps because, it was apolitical.
Postmodern Culture, Aesthetics, and the Arts 55

John Updike recalled in an interview of l971, at the publication of his


Rabbit Redux: “We didn’t much think of politics. We were much
more concerned with the private destiny that shaped people”, and he
affirms his older tenet: “you introduce topical material into the novel
at your own peril. I am convinced that a life of a nation is reflected,
or distorted, by private people and their minute concerns” (qtd. in
Dickstein 93-94).
The modern novel, on the other hand, had exhausted, in
Barry Hannah’s words, “the ambitious grandness [of] Wolfe and
Henry Miller and Faulkner that the contemporary mind simply does
not want to face” (Vanarsdall 338), and the “high” themes of “love
and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice”
(Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! 361), as well as the elevated
existential tone, and now had come to emphasize the everyday
concerns of ordinary people in a matter-of-fact language. There was
not left much space for innovation. When the subject of the novel is
no longer the “large” I of the metaphysical or quasi-metaphysical
tradition of universal unity but the “small” or “weak” I that
endeavors to integrate the private and social aspects of the person in
a leveling and at the same time partialized world, and when narrative
form and language are no longer objects of experimentation, because
the paradigms of the traditional and the modern novel have been used
up, the novel is in for repetition and for competition from other
media. It is in for repetition because the everyday concerns of people
and the habitual narrative strategies are apt to repeat themselves, and,
becoming clichéd, can scarcely create the crucial difference that
creates unique (depth or essentialist) meaning; it is in for competition
because newspapers, magazines and the electronic media have taken
over the task of social information and analysis. Thus the postmodern
change of the premises and strategies of fiction answered to signs of
exhaustion in the novel and to the new distribution of roles in the
communication system of society.

2.3. The Art Series: Parody, Irony, and the Transformation of


the Artistic Tradition

Confirmation and subversion, endorsement, and resistance


characterize the whole aesthetic scene in postmodernism — and not
only in postmodernism. Resistance can be understood in Foucault’s
56 From Modernism to Postmodernism

terms, varying Hegel’s concept of dialectics, as part of the power


game, as “the odd term in relations of power[;] they are inscribed in
the latter as an irreducible opposite” (1976, 96). The antithesis of
confirmation and subversion (resistance) defines at least three
aesthetic domains. First, as already mentioned, it plays its part within
the text. Within the pattern of the single text, contradictory
discourses serve the two different intentions of reflecting and
subverting the power structures of the external world. Second, as we
noted before, this antithesis designates the relation between the
system of art, which, in Gass’s pointed formulation, “counts as a
cultural surplus” and has “no occasion, no external justification”
(1985, 194), and its socio-cultural context, which of course does not
disappear since the text’s created world is ”always a metaphorical
model of our own” (1970, 60). Reflection/confirmation and
subversion/resistance take on the form of affirming and transgressing
the borderlines between art and the cultural environment. Third,
endorsement and resistance mark the relationship between
author/text and the art tradition, i.e., the art concepts in general and
the specific conventions and rules of the respective art discipline in
particular. Author and text endorse, vary, or rebel against the
authority and control mechanisms of preset rules and the underlying
ideology of art, following the fundamental human drives of repetition
and innovation. The postmodern position grows out of a dynamic
interaction of all three antithetical versions of confirmation and
subversion mentioned (discourses within the text, art and
environment, and artwork and art tradition). Here we concentrate on
the relation between text and artistic tradition.
Art as a concept and the various disciplines into which it
unfolds relate not only to the socio-cultural context but also follow
their own laws, which partly run parallel and partly, differ among
themselves. The immanent laws of literature and the visual arts are
semi-autonomous, yet they are also similar in their intention and
function as art. These intrinsic rules of art and its disciplines direct
the evolution of artistic forms and devices, and establish the pattern
of the artistic series, the inherent cycle of the New, the cycle of the
beginning, maturing, and decaying of concepts and strategies, though
of course one kind of painting, music, fiction never fully abolishes
another kind. There is always the simultaneity of the non-
simultaneous; only the dominants change. The flow of time works in
Postmodern Culture, Aesthetics, and the Arts 57

two seemingly contradictory ways: towards self-organization and


culmination of the one model and then towards its self-criticism and
self-destruction, though the paradigm does not just disappear after it
has become a dead end, but still leaves indications about what
follows, since every phase of art, just as every phase of life, adds to
our stock of ideas, options, strategies in the attempt to cope with art
and life. To set the phenomenon of the literary series or cycle in a
wider context we may refer to Thomas Kuhn’s description of
scientific revolution (in his aforementioned The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions), as the change of paradigms, and note his
observation that scientific paradigms after they have become
inadequate are replaced by new ones that are more adequate than
their predecessors in the representation of reality; and we may also
turn to chaos theory or complexity theory that Barth in his Stuttgart
lectures applies to “the way many people live” and to literary
phenomena like plot. Here, Prigogine’s branch of the chaos theory
that concerns itself with self-organizing systems is not relevant, but
rather what Barth, quoting Per Bak and Kan Chen, emphasizes,
namely “self-organized criticality”, the fact that “interactive systems
may not only organize themselves into being but ‘organize
themselves into a critical state,’” that in fact “‘many composite
systems [...] naturally evolve to a critical state’” (1995, 338). The
literary series is such a composite system or paradigm that naturally
evolves to a critical state. The crisis manifests itself, as the Russian
Formalists have maintained, in (self-critical) parody of the old,
before one paradigm or composite system is replaced by another.
The literary paradigm develops towards the critical state in
two ways. One evolves from the fear of repetition; it leads to
differentiation, the growth of complexity and subtlety, and finally, in
the process of sophistication, to the exhaustion of the inherent
possibilities of the paradigm by the ever-present demands of
innovation, of the new, of radicalizing themes and means of
expression, of increasing the intricacy of issues and forms. The other
cause of decay is, conversely, repetition, the inevitable process of
automatization and stylization (for instance of the modern ideology
of art, of its ground theme, alienation, and of the symbolic method of
establishing meaning — the exhaustion of all three contribute to the
rise of postmodern art). The Russian Formalists paid special attention
to this logic of automatism in the scheme of literary evolution that
58 From Modernism to Postmodernism

they were particularly interested in. Jakobson/Tynjanov mention in


their theses of l928 the literary “series” and “other series”, and Boris
Eikhenbaum speaks of “the literary movement as such” (qtd. in
Ehrlich 1981, 92). The catalysts of literary change are seen to be
stylization and parody of the conventional and the used-up. Of
course, the stages and manners in which the circle of growth, decay,
and renewal takes place may differ within the various art media,
since all artistic disciplines have their own immanent laws and do not
necessarily hold to the same temporal sequence of innovation and
exhaustion nor treat them in the same way. Twentieth century
painting and fiction, for instance, follow a different chronological
order in the historical sequence they establish of (pictorial and
narrative) representation and anti-representation (abstraction), in the
combination or new definition of abstraction and concretization and
the new strategic orientation in general: painting reaching the stage
of abstraction early in the twentieth century, fiction, as far as one can
speak of abstraction in literature, late in the century, as we shall
demonstrate in more detail later.
Postmodern fiction as part of the art cycle is obviously the
late phase of the narrative series beginning with modernism (or
romanticism). Following the idea that cycles of art complete and
exhaust themselves but also begin new ones, three views of
postmodern aesthetics are possible. Either postmodern art appears to
begin a new cycle after the exhaustion of modernism, or, conversely,
it can be seen as completing and exhausting aesthetic modernism. Or
postmodern art begins something new within the great modern
tradition; in this case exhaustion and beginning anew are the two
sides of the same thing, are complementary, which, however, says
nothing about which side will finally win out, exhaustion or
replenishment. In fact all three views appear to be possible,
depending on which text is analyzed and which view is taken —
another example of postmodern perspectivism. Since, as Adorno and
Lyotard have maintained, criticism of positions can only take place
in the terms and language of the target criticized and thus is always
affected by that which it criticizes, postmodern writers and texts are
significantly influenced by the modern artistic ideas and strategies
against which they revolt, for instance by the high evaluation of
form, though the postmodernists add force to form, chaos to
structure. The way the two are combined distinguishes the
Postmodern Culture, Aesthetics, and the Arts 59

postmodern writers from one another (see below the discussion of the
narrated situation as frame). Barth calls himself a “romantic
formalist” (1995, 326), and Gass believes that “the artist’s fun-
damental loyalty must be to form”, and that his or her “aim is to
make something supremely worthwhile, to make something in-
herently valuable in itself”, and he is “happy this is an old-fashioned
view” (1996, 35).
The blending of modern and postmodern features leads to a
double-coding of the text, to transitions between modernism and
postmodernism, the superimposition of their viewpoints and
strategies. Barth, for example, calls his collection of short stories,
Lost in the Funhouse, generally taken as a model exercise in
postmodernism, “late-modernist marvels” (1984, 203). Yet, generally
speaking, he considers himself “as one of the few ‘Postmodernist’
writers who uncomplainingly accept that designation” (1995, 277).
The labeling process is complex, the more so since every writer has
different ideas about his place in the historical process and does not
like to be classified anyway, cherishing his or her uniqueness. Gass
calls any number of otherwise designated postmodernists, including
Calvino, Barth, Barthelme, Coover, Hawkes, and himself, late-
Modernists, while Barth calls them Postmodernists (1995, 295, 122).
And in fact, one can read certain postmodern texts in both a modern
and a postmodern way. Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, for instance,
the central text of literary postmodernism, is in many ways double-
coded. A “modern” reading of the novel makes visible the horizon of
alienation, disillusionment, and pain, as well as the quest for identity,
the attempt at formal design, at a vision of the whole, and an
aesthetic of negativity in Adorno’s sense, emphasizing the autonomy
of art and its necessary freedom from all extraneous influences — all
of which serve to temper the postmodern eclecticism in theme, the
dissolution of the subject, the dissemination of meaning, the play
with theme and character, form and composition, and the
perspectives of radical irony and the comic mode.
Insofar as postmodern aesthetic ideology entails a
“liberation” of fiction from exhausted traditions, it also brings about
an “emancipation” of the reader of fiction from the conventional and
the used-to and the chronological sequence, in favor of the
simultaneous and non-synchronous. Postmodern perspectivism in
terms of reader reception means that every text can be read in a
60 From Modernism to Postmodernism

number of ways. One may indeed not only recognize modern


features in postmodern texts but also receive modern texts in a
postmodern vein. Reading modernist texts in a postmodern way
would imply shifting attention from the unity of form (which,
according to the early Lukács, is the “ersatz for God”) to the cracks
in the modern formal structures and the incongruities in the
evaluating perspectives, and recognizing — for instance in Joyce’s or
Beckett’s strategies, especially their comic mode, or in Faulkner’s
concept of history in Absalom, Absalom! — a precarious advancing
of the modern program of awareness and its “vision of the whole”
(Spender) towards the breaking-point, in anticipation of the
postmodern concern with deconstructive and pluralistic viewpoints
and techniques. Residing within the depth and scope of modern
awareness and truth, within the wholeness of aesthetic form, one can
see hidden, or not so hidden, the explosive “anti-aesthetic”,
dissociative force of chaos, which rends form apart when the latter
attempts to encompass in its structure the widest possible range and
greatest intensity of the ambiguities and contrarieties of human
existence and thought. Ihab Hassan has done much to establish a
connection between the American experiments of the Sixties and the
avantgarde of European modernism in order to constitute an a-
chronological, typological view of postmodernism: “The postmodern
spirit lies coiled within the great corpus of modernism. [...] It is not
really a matter of chronology: Sade, Jarry, Breton, Kafka
acknowledge that spirit” (1982, 139).
The question is, how postmodern art, being the late stage of a
developmental series, finds its place in the literary cycle, both
relating to the old and producing something new. This is the subject
of John Barth’s early diagnosis of the situation of contemporary art.
The “renaissance” of fiction (Coover in LeClair and McCaffery 65)
at such a late stage of a literary series puts the writer, according to
Barth, in a paradoxical situation and demands from him or her a new
balance between repetition and innovation, exhaustion and
replenishment, expectation and surprise: “An artist should be aware
of the effects that have been wrought in his genre and of the kinds of
things that have been said so that he will appreciate the problems of
saying anything freshly and originally at this late hour. [...] This
catches him in something of a paradox: the more he knows, the better
an artist he can theoretically become, and yet the knowledge he
Postmodern Culture, Aesthetics, and the Arts 61

acquires is overwhelming — it places him in competition with the


accumulated best of human history”. However, there is no choice
but “to confront the complexity, [...] and decide you are by no means
paralyzed by that confrontation”, “in spite of the apocalyptic feeling
that we all have about America at the moment [1971]” (Gado 138,
118). In a by now famous essay of l967, “The Literature of
Exhaustion” (complemented twelve years later with the essay “The
Literature of Replenishment”, which was to clear up some
misunderstandings that the first article had allegedly caused), Barth
says that staying creative in literature and the arts means to
aestheticize further the already aestheticized material of art and
environment. It is a matter of countering “the used-upness of certain
forms or exhaustion of certain possibilities” (1984, 64), and he points
to Borges as a model whose “aesthetic victory [...] is that he
confronts an intellectual dead end and employs it against itself to
accomplish new human work” (69-70). The transfer of the used-up,
the conventional and the fixed into ever new, non-stereotyped, and
flexible imaginary configurations is attained not so much by the
innovation of new forms, though now form is extended to include
anti-form, as by the activation of comprehensive, relativizing
attitudes, by parody, irony, and the comic mode. The method of
parody is “to try to abstract the pattern [...] to follow the pattern” and
by following it “to parody the pattern” (Bellamy 1974, 13); the
strategy of irony is labyrinthine, for “[a] labyrinth, after all, is a place
in which, ideally, all the possibilities of choice (of direction in this
case) are embodied, and [...] must be exhausted [by a host of ironic
reversals] before one reaches the heart” (Barth 1984, 82); the “free”
comic mode of the postmodern text creates a ridiculous simultaneity
of the non-simultaneous.
In this historical shift, each of the arts, facing exhaustion,
periodically makes an effort to reach back to the archetypal sources
of its energy and the primal techniques of its genre: in the case of
fiction it is “plain” narrative, in the case of painting the repre-
sentation of a pictorial world. In both cases the attempt is made to
foreground the sheer procedural (and chaotic or random) energy of
creation without the control of regulating form, though the text, by
following a definite deconstructive theory, as it were, takes on its
own form, even if it is a “theoretical” form. For the appreciation and
understanding of the theoretical form of this art, it is of course
62 From Modernism to Postmodernism

necessary to know the theory and recognize it in its manifestation


(Federman, Sukenick; minimalistic and conceptual visual art).
Postmodern fiction integrates and plays with the idea of the end of art
(of the current paradigm of art), as well as with the return to the
sources of narrative energy. It carries out the return to primal story
telling in a kind of self-parody, the author realizing that at this late
stage of history a “naive” state of mind cannot exist on its own but
has to be expressed in a more complex, post-innocent frame of self-
consciousness or self-irony or both. We will give two examples,
Barth and Barthelme, the one a “maximalist”, the other a
“minimalist”.
For Barth “simple” storytelling belongs to the past; it can
appear in literary fiction only in a multi-layered composition such as
he provides in stories like “Lost in the Funhouse”, “Menelaiad” or
“Anonymiad”, from the collection Lost in the Funhouse, or
“Dunyazadiad” from Chimera —all are framed by discourses of self-
reflection, doubt, criticism, analysis of the current process of writing.
The fear that art has exhausted itself is confronted with reflections on
the possibility of its replenishment. Barth writes in “Bellerophoniad”
(Chimera) self-consciously and self-critically: “How does one write a
novella? How find the channel, bewildered in these creeks and
crannies? Storytelling is not my cup of wine; isn’t somebody’s; my
plot doesn’t rise and fall in meaningful stages but winds upon itself
[...]: digresses, retreats, hesitates, groans from its utter et cetera,
collapses, dies” (CH 205); or he notes in “Life Story”: “Another
story about a writer writing a story! Another regressus in infinitum!
Who doesn’t prefer art that at least overtly imitates something other
than its own processes?”(LF 114) In “Dunyazadiad”, the suddenly
appearing genie, representing in his utterances the problems of the
contemporary writer, sees a solution only in a paradoxical procedure:
to go beyond his past performances “toward a future they were not
attuned to and, by some magic, at the same time go back to the
original springs of narrative” (CH 17). This means for Barth to return
to the earliest myths and legends, whose patterns, derived from
Greek mythology or books like The 1001 Nights, are then
consciously transformed into multi-layered schemes, indeed attuned
to both the past and the future by the ironic attitude of the artistic
discourse (See also Calvino 1975).
Postmodern Culture, Aesthetics, and the Arts 63

Barthelme is another example of this self-reflexive concern


with art. In Snow White, one of the dwarfs raises the crucial question
whether postmodern fiction is serious enough about human problems
outside the aesthetic realm; he thus touches on the ethics-vs.-
aesthetics issue that has accompanied the critical evaluation of
postmodern fiction from the beginning. Kevin counters his own
doubts by referring to the postmodern epistemological and
ontological uncertainties, to his own disillusionment with both the
distortions of subjectivity and the didactic formalism, as well as to
the adversary ethos of modern high culture and art in general:

‘There is not enough seriousness in what we do,’ Kevin said. ‘Everyone


wanders around having his own individual perceptions. These, like balls of
different colors and shapes and sizes, roll around on the green billiard table
of consciousness ...’ Kevin stopped and began again. ‘Where is the figure
in the carpet? Or is it just ...carpet?’ he asked. ‘Where is -’ ‘You’re talking
a lot of buffalo hump, you know that,’ Hubert said. Hubert walked away.
Kevin stood there (SW 129).

Kevin stands there not knowing, uncertain. Barthelme’s answer to


the question of how to represent uncertainty, together with the loss of
substance and the increase of waste, is quite different from Barth’s
and marks the other method of postmodern fiction, or rather the other
pole of irrealism or the fantastic (which is the quintessence of
postmodern fiction in general and to which we will devote an extra
section): not to re-make and re-vitalize the used-up and clichéd
material and form by foregrounding an attitude of irony and parody
and the return to the sources, but rather to include “debris” into the
“design” (Hawkes), and to “have a lot of dreck in them [the books],
matter which presents itself as not wholly relevant (or indeed, at all
relevant) but which, carefully attended to, can supply a kind of
‘sense’ of what is going on” (SW l06). “Dreck”, waste or debris are
here the terms that denote the adversaries of significant form, the
used-up, the insignificant, meaningless, and superfluous, which,
however, considering the large consequences that the initial (waste)
condition always has, have to be made use of as indeed significant; in
fact, the dwarf observes, we are now “at such a point [...] the
question turns from the question of disposing of this ‘trash’ to a
question of appreciating its qualities, because, after all, it’s 100
percent” (SW 97).
64 From Modernism to Postmodernism

The terms of significance have obviously changed in


postmodern fiction: linearity, linear causality, and qualitative
difference lose much of their impact (as far as that is possible in
narrative, which is time-bound) in the orderly “descent” into disorder
or arbitrariness. Of course it would have been possible to compensate
the decline of temporality with (modern) “spatial” arrangements,
with the foregrounding of meaning-building simultaneity, methods
important for what Sharon Spencer calls the modern “architectonic
novel”, which is a “spatial” novel. But the composite arrangements
of the postmodern New Fiction do not establish a “spatial”, or
structural order either; they do not construct a rationalizable or
meaningful equilibrium. Symmetry and asymmetry are often indistin-
guishable, and parts can neither be analyzed separately nor
designated as signifying parts of a definable whole; and yet a
“message” clearly comes through, which creates its own, non-organic
form: namely, that order includes disorder or randomness, and order
evolves spontaneously from disorder and chaotic conditions of
randomness (see Prigogine’s chaos theory). In Barthelme’s words
from “The Dolt”, one of the results of both multiplicity and the “trash
phenomenon” is that “[e]ndings are elusive, middles are nowhere to
be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin” (Sixty
Stories); Barth, however, notes: “Beginnings are exciting; middles
are gratifying; but endings, boyoboy” (OwS 222). The individual
strategies of narrative may be different, yet what Barthelme, Barth,
and all the other postmodern writers practice is the abandonment of
the apparently no longer relevant concepts of essence and uniqueness
and hierarchic order, and their replacement by the notions of
pluralism and “perspectivism” (Nietzsche), which, however, not only
relativize the concepts of order but also those of chaos. In the words
from Snow White: “But my main point is that you should bear in
mind multiplicity, and forget about uniqueness” (SW 75). Both
Barthelme’s “trash phenomenon”, and the “‘endless’ quality” (SW
96) of multiplicity signal (playfully) the end of aesthetic integration
and centered structure — in the sense that all loose ends are finally
assembled into a meaningful whole — and thus implicitly refer to
exhaustion (of the modern art concept), to the end-of-art theme from
within the text, while, on the other hand, the text as gestalt/nongestalt
constantly calls up the ideas of order and form, of integrative art. The
modern idea of organic form functions as a kind of “minus function”
Postmodern Culture, Aesthetics, and the Arts 65

(Lotman). Theoretical reflections of the writers about art outside the


fictional text take up this end-of-art theme by raising doubts not
about the form problem but about the function of art in a culture
where the claims of art no longer go unchallenged and have to
compete with other popular (“trash”) forms of communication,
information, and analysis and their demands on society. Gass claims,
arguing in fact from a modernist aesthetic viewpoint, that “[a]rt
seems the only objective thing left whose value can be reasonably
justified”, only to add, however, in a postmodern manner, ”but I have
great skepticism even about that in my wiser days”.
If postmodernism entails both the disruption and
continuation of modernism, it is obviously disruption that comes
first. This brings us to a final point: deconstruction and liberation
obviously find their ultimate limit only in extremes and in excess, and
it is only in the two that they fulfill themselves and prepare for a new
beginning. But these extremes are different from the modernist ones.
While between the wars, “boundary situations” (Jaspers) and states
of emergency or exception were made into a logic of the extreme
(Carl Schmitt, Lukács, Heidegger, Benjamin, Bloch, Bataille) and
determined the literature of alienation in general and the situation of
the fictional character in particular (Hemingway, Faulkner, and a
host of others), they are shunned now, in the latter part of the
century, together with essentialist views of identity, or they are
relativized or ironized, framed by other (epistemological and
ontological) concerns, as are the paranoiac characters in Pynchon’s
novels. Extreme psychological situations are no longer the crucial
theme of the postmodern novel. They scarcely can any longer offer
veritable possibilities of experiencing the authentic or the true, for
the character is seen to be a composite of roles or “stories”, living in
“a large number of fragmentary possible worlds” (Foucault 1970,
183). Barth says in The End of the Road with regard to character:
“the same life lends itself to any number of stories” (ER 5); and he
repeats the idea in an interview: “I’ve always been impressed by the
multiplicity of people that one has in one” (Prince 57). In fact, in
contrast to the psychologically extreme, the ordinary is revived
(Barthelme, Elkin), the ordinary, however, just like the
psychological, transformed into the fantastic, which demonstrates
that the extreme in postmodern fiction is a matter of artistry, of
method, not one of inner life and of the conceived fictionality of the
66 From Modernism to Postmodernism

real that art reflects (see the sections on the fantastic and the
ordinary). Gass calls himself a “Methodologist (my term for my
type)”, and to his type belong most of the postmodern writers, even if
they stress the role of chaos in their fiction (see below), because, in
Hawkes’s terms, debris and design belong together. Gass writes: “A
Methodologist (for whom the medium is the muse) will reformulate
traditional aesthetic problems in terms of language” (1996, 50-51),
and, Barth demands, “regard fiction as artifice in the first place”
(Bellamy 1974,15), postmodern concepts of art which lead to a mode
of fiction that Barth calls “irrealism”.
The extremes and excesses in postmodern fiction thus do not
generally concern the character, or they relate to the character in a
way that the uncertainty of the outer situation that the character faces
is extreme and leads to paranoia, as in Pynchon’s novels, which is
different from the test of character in boundary situations, as for
instance in Hemingway. In the rivalry between situation and
character, as we will argue later, the situation wins, not the character,
which is dispersed. The excess in postmodern narrative is generally
not determined by the excess of sorrow, grief, inner unfullfillment,
loss of identity, though these plays a role too, especially in Pynchon,
but by an aesthetic excess, an excess at the borderline of the
aesthetically possible, on the edge of intelligibility. The
nonsensicality of the performance right on or beyond the edge of
intelligibility eliminates the full seriousness that modernist fiction
cannot do without because of the dominance of the alienation theme
(with the partial exception of Joyce, Kafka and Faulkner, who also
use the comic view as an additional perspective). The function of
fiction where it appears to become art for art’s or nonart’s sake is
obviously not only to shock a bourgeois audience, which has been
accustomed to radical experiments by modernism anyway, but to
push experimentalism to the end of the road. As mentioned,
experiments are increasingly defined by theory, which is then set into
practice. Such a theory of excess is what Sukenick calls “the Bossa
Nova, an elaboration of the new tradition. Needless to say the Bossa
Nova has no plot, no story, no character, no chronological sequence,
no verisimilitude, no imitation, no allegory, no symbolism, no
subject matter, no ‘meaning’” (1975b, 43). Abish, Sorrentino,
Barthelme, Burroughs, and Federman may here exemplify the play
with the utter extreme of narrative experiment.
Postmodern Culture, Aesthetics, and the Arts 67

Abish’s linguistic tour de force, Alphabetical Africa, is an


example of how the text can be overloaded with form at the expense
of content. It follows in its composition a system deliberately set up
by the author wherein the alphabet is the exclusive regulating
principle of composition and is to be adhered to strictly in its own
terms. Every word of the first chapter begins with the letter A; the
second with A or B; the third with A, B, or C. At Z the process
reverses: the final chapter has words again beginning with A. Abish,
reflecting on Alphabetical Africa and, speaking for many of his
colleagues, says: “Feeling a distrust of the understanding that is
intrinsic to any communication, I decided to write a book in which
my distrust became a determining factor upon which the flow of
narrative was largely predicated” (cited on the dust jacket of the
book). Similarly, in Sorrentino’s Splendide-Hotel, the “haphazard”
“shaping principle”(Sorrentino) of a number of meditations is again
nothing but the alphabet. Barthelme, in a piece like “Sentence”,
again full of theoretical rigor, transfers the rationality of syntax into
the irrationality of collage by spreading one sentence, without
punctuation marks, over about nine pages, a procedure that, by
leaving out the links by which we orient ourselves, disrupts
communication already after half a page, forcing the reception
process into a string of chance combinations. The reader, in
Barthelme’s words, is “bumping into something that is there, like a
rock or a refrigerator” (1964, 15). Burroughs is even more rigid in
the repulsion of control and the exploitation of chance and
indeterminacy by making chance not only the reception but also the
production principle. First in The Exterminator (1960), written with
Brion Gysin, he combines the cut-up method with the collage
principle, supposedly to release the mind from the oppressions of the
rationalizing principles of society. In Burroughs’s words: “take a
page more or less of your own writing, or from any writer living or
dead. Cut into sections with scissors or switchblade as preferred and
rearrange the sections. Looking away. Now write out the result”
(1962a, unpaginated).
Introducing a “new paginal (rather than grammatical)
syntax”, Federman and Sukenick extend the aesthetic of fiction into
the immediate visual domain of the page, into the filling of its spaces,
where, according to Federman, in order to emphasize the
“deliberately illogical, irrational, unrealistic, non sequitur, and
68 From Modernism to Postmodernism

incoherent” character of the text, “the fiction writer can, at any time
introduce material (quotations, pictures, diagrams, charts, designs,
pieces of other discourses, doodles, etc.) totally unrelated to the story
he is in the process of telling; or else, he can simply leave those
spaces blank, because fiction is as much what is said as what is not
said, since what is said is not necessarily true, and since what is said
can always be said another way”. Thus “the real medium becomes
the printed word as it is presented on the page, as it is perceived,
heard, read, visualized (not abstractly but concretely) by the
receiver”. Furthermore, in order to “renew our system of reading”
and “give the reader a sense of free participation in the
writing/reading process”, the receiver is set free, too, which is a way
to equate randomness with order and to open multiple and
simultaneous ways of reading. To this purpose, Federman comes to
abandon the numeration of pages, and to suggest that the reader
discard the consecutive, prearranged left-to-right and top-to-bottom
way of reading, thus leaving the recipient with the choice of how to
proceed, demanding that “the elements of the new fictitious discourse
[...] will occur simultaneously and offer multiple possibilities of
rearrangement in the process of reading” (1975, 10, 13, 12, 10, 9,11).
The provocative “anti-narrative” procedures of Burroughs, Abish,
Sorrentino, Federman, and Sukenick — who again speaks of
“juxtaposition and manipulation of the print on the page” (1975b, 38)
— reject the signals of communication and interpretation expected
by the reader. It is important to note that Federman and the
mentioned authors are “not alone in these wild imaginings. Many
contemporary writers, each in his own personal ‘mad’ way, have
already successfully created [this] kind of fiction” (Federman 1975,
14). These personal wild imaginings that Federman speaks of also
include more narrowly narrative strategies; they generally open the
text to the play with attitudes, positions and strategies, for instance in
comic-apocalyptic novels (Heller, Catch 22, Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle,
Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow), in the use of the systems theory and
the abundant serial multiplication of plotlines in Barth’s LETTERS,
or in Pynchon’s V the immense range of partial perspectives on the
letter V or the adventure plot, and the multiplication of history.
It is interesting to note that these excesses on the edge of
intelligibility in the end phase of the literary series are not only
explained by aesthetic reasons, the exhaustion of the literary tradition
Postmodern Culture, Aesthetics, and the Arts 69

of which Barth and a host of other postmodern writers make so


much, but also by analogy with the socio-cultural environment of
which they are part. Philip Roth in a famous, much-quoted remark
asserted that “the American writer in the middle of the twentieth
century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe,
and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it
sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is continually outdoing our talents,
and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any
novelist” (“Writing” 144). Similarly, Coover notes that “each single
instant of the world is so impossibly complex[;] we cannot
accumulate all the data needed for a complete, objective statement”
(Gado 152). Don DeLillo says in an interview: “what’s been missing
over these past twenty-five years is a sense of a manageable reality.
[...] We seem much more aware of elements like randomness and
ambiguity and chaos since then” (DeCurtis 48). And Sukenick
writes: “What we have now is a fiction of the impossible that thrives
on its own impossibility, which is no more or less impossible these
days than, say, city life, politics or peace between the sexes” (1975a,
8). Ishmael Reed for his part remarks in Flight to Canada: “Strange,
history. Complicated, too. It will always be a mystery, history. New
disclosures are as bizarre as the most bizarre fantasy”(8). In
Nabokov’s Ada we read that the world of Demonia or Antiterra is “a
distortive glass of our distorted globe” (25), and Abish declares, in
addition to the afore-quoted remark about the problems of
communication and understanding, that he predicates his novel
Alphabetical Africa on the premise that “the innovative novel is, in
essence, a novel of disfamiliarization, a novel that has ceased to
concern itself with the mapping of the ‘familiar world’” (W. Martin
238). Finally, Vonnegut says that what is wrong with this world is
“the most ridiculous superstition of all: that humanity is at the center
of the universe, the fulfiller or the frustrator of the grandest dreams
of God Almighty” (Vonnegut, Wampeters 163). In fact, in driving
the text towards the excess of order or disorder or both, postmodern
fiction reconnects, via the dissolution or multiplication or excess of
form, with the lifeworld and its excesses, excess being the link
between the two, the extremities of fiction on the edge of
intelligibility and the drastic excesses of public life — for instance
the Red Scare and the Rosenberg case of the 1950s (Coover, The
Public Burning); the wasteland and senseless violence of war
70 From Modernism to Postmodernism

(Hawkes, The Cannibal; Heller, Catch 22; Pynchon, Gravity’s


Rainbow, Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five); the Sixties youth
activities, their illusionary peace and love slogans (Brautigan, In
Watermelon Sugar); the Cold War and computer technology (Barth,
Giles Goat-Boy), the white man’s ideological deformation of history
(Reed, Mumbo Jumbo), and so on. Yet going right to the extreme has
paradoxically not only a stifling, entropic but also a liberating,
negentropic effect.
We have come to a point, where practically no taboos are left
to be assaulted. The postmodern breakthrough in terms of new
subject matter and new form/antiform reaches in the works of these
authors its intrinsic limits. In the very extremity of Abish’s,
Sorrentino’s, Burroughs’s, Federman’s or Sukenick’s texts, or
Barth’s LETTERS, the subversive purpose of the avantgarde has
come finally to subvert itself, which implies the end of the avant-
garde but also the necessity to recast the novel, to find new molds for
narrative, a new mixture of discourses and counter-discourses. It is
important to note that this is not the task of a time after
postmodernism, but that it is the very task that postmodern fiction
itself faces after it has gone to the limit, farther than which there is no
advancing; “there is”, in Sukenick’s words, “some indefinable line
beyond which the art you are working in becomes some other art, or
no art at all” (1975b, 39), a line which almost all the writers test in
their own way before redefining their methods. This limit-testing is
key to understanding of the New Fiction, which, having faced
(already with Burroughs’s cut-up method at the end of the Fifties and
beginning of the Sixties) the ultimate edge of possibilities, where
possibility turns into mere arbitrariness, has had to recast its
discourses. Because of the communication problem in the intercourse
with the reader, a problem that grows with the increase of complexity
and multiplicity in the composition of the text, there is not much road
left to go forward on after a certain point of randomness has been
reached. But the road is open for unlimited returns, for “rebell[ing]
along traditional lines”, to use Barth’s phrase (he speaks of “novels
which imitate the form of the Novel, by an author who imitates the
role of Author” [1984, 79]), for arranging the simultaneity of the
non-simultaneous, for any amount of reversals of direction and
replenishments on the way. The logical result is an eclecticism of a
special kind, which not only takes up and combines already used and
Postmodern Culture, Aesthetics, and the Arts 71

still available subject matter and narrative methods but interprets


them in the intellectual spirit of our time, in terms of irony, which, as
we will see later, includes relativism and tolerance. In “Literature of
Replenishment”, Barth creates an intellectual program out of
tolerance for the other and the need to connect, to combine but also
to redirect.

I deplore the artistic and critical cast of mind that repudiates the whole
modernist enterprise as an aberration and sets to work as if it hadn’t
happened; that rushes back into the arms of nineteenth century middleclass
realism as if the first half of the twentieth century hadn’t 65 happened. [...]
On the other hand, it is no longer necessary, if it ever was, to repudiate
them, either: the great premodernists. If the modernists, carrying the torch
of romanticism, taught us that linearity, rationality, consciousness, cause
and effect, naive illusionism, transparent language, innocent anecdote, and
middle-class moral convention are not the whole story, then, from the
perspective of these closing decades of our century we may appreciate that
the contraries of those things are not the whole story either. [...] A worthy
program for postmodern fiction, I believe, is the synthesis or transcension
of these antitheses, which may be summed up as premodernist and
modernist modes of writing. My ideal postmodernist author neither merely
repudiates nor merely imitates either his twentieth century modernist
parents or his premodernist grandparents. [...] The ideal postmodernist
novel will somehow rise above the quarrel between realism and irrealism,
formalism and ‘contentism’, pure and committed literature, coterie fiction
and junk fiction” (1984, 202-203).

Many of the postmodern writers indeed practice a mixture of


strategies. Richard Poirier has noted of Pynchon’s protagonists that
they perform on different levels (1971). They function in the power
games, stand for an intellectual opinion or an attitude, but also have
the capacity to surprise and develop, the way characters do in
“realistic” (modern) novels. Resisting the power of the dehumanizing
System of Authorities and its aggressive activities, these characters
surprise and develop and turn into beings that approach E.M.
Forster’s “round” characters, with “modern” feelings of pain and
alienation. The same is true of many of Barth’s, Coover’s, Elkin’s,
Gass’s, Hawkes’s central characters, or Heller’s Yossarian in Catch
22. One excess is often countered by another excess, the insanity of
the system, for instance, by the counter-insanity called paranoia. The
excess of both allows for an ironizing variation of in-between
perspectives, for a replenishment at “the end of the road” (the title of
Barth’s early novel).
72 From Modernism to Postmodernism

2.4. Intertextuality, the Creative Writer, and the Power-


Resistance Paradigm

All considerations of the status of art circle around the


relationship between autonomy and dependency. The interrelations
between individual texts, between the text and the cultural condition,
between the text and the literary tradition can be summed up under
the concept of intertextuality. Intertextuality is a special kind of
pluralism, pluralism of influences, pluralism of codes and discourses
within the text, pluralism also in terms of the reader or, rather, the
dialectic interrelation between text and reader. One important aspect
of this pluralizing intertextuality is that it opens the way, as Roland
Barthes argues, for overcoming the subject-object dichotomy in the
reading process. To gain freedom for both text and reader and their
interaction, Barthes decomposes and pluralizes both the concept of
the object, i.e., the text — “[t]he more plural the text, the less it is
written before I read it” (1974, 10), and the concept of the subject,
the reader, whether as historical person or phenomenological
construct. Just as the text is pluralized not only by the intention of the
author but already by the plurality and diversity of determinate
cultural and narrative codes that it participates in, the reader is
pluralized by the knowledge of literary conventions and other texts,
which make up the horizon of expectation and understanding; again
in Barthes’s words: “This ‘I’ which approaches the text is already
itself a plurality of other texts, of codes which are infinite, or, more
precisely, lost (whose origin is lost)” (1974, 10).
In its extreme form, the concept of intertextuality reduces the
writer and the text (and the character) to meeting points of outside
influences, and thus discontinues the author’s claims to independent
authorship and autonomous status. This is a curtailment and
transformation of the notion of creativity that, if this reduction of the
importance of author intention is reasoned out with all consequences,
leads to what has been called “the death of the author” (Foucault,
Barthes). It leads also to the death of the text as a unique gestalt.
Intertextuality regards text and artwork as so dependent on, and
permeable to, influences from outside that it cannot claim
authenticity as a singular work of art on its own terms. But this is not
the whole truth. Since the text, whatever the mixture of its codes, is a
Postmodern Culture, Aesthetics, and the Arts 73

circumscribed gestalt on its own terms, too, there is in fact an


antinomy between openness and closure of the text, an aesthetic
condition which has productive potential for the imagination because
of its doubleness, its “superimprinting one text on the other” (Derrida
1981, 26) and “dissemination” (1988a) of meaning. On the one hand,
there are always other texts and contexts at the origin of every text;
no text is self-contained; in Derrida’s words: ”A writing that refers
back only to itself carries us at the same time, indefinitely and
systematically to some other writing”. On the other hand, the text
exists only in and for itself: “It is necessary that while referring each
time to another text, to another determinate system, each organism
only refers to itself as a determinate structure” (1988a, 102). The
same dialectic holds true for the author. Barthes on the one hand
argues that a text is “a multidimensional space in which a variety of
writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue
of quotations drawn from innumerable centers of culture”. On the
other hand, the author’s “power is to mix writings, to counter the
ones with others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them”
(1977, 146). Gass reflects this double position of the author as
recipient and creator by making, in an early essay, the writer a god as
to the range of his imagination and the openness of the text (1996,
36), while denying him this role as absolute “commanding creator”,
as god, in a later article (268).
The postmodern writer, for instance Barth, Pynchon,
Sorrentino, and Sukenick, in fact plays with the tension between text
and context, the closed aesthetic system of discourses and the open
system exposed to the invading cultural codes, the influence from
outside. They attempt to contain this tension or make it productive
for the composition of the text and thus stay in control. There are at
least four strategies for attaining this goal. They all transfer this
dialectic of open and closed system, of invasion and containment,
dependence and uniqueness, into the matrix of the text itself as the
dialectic of certainty and uncertainty, power and resistance. The most
simple strategy for keeping in control is to thematize intertextuality
directly, to refer to other writers or philosophic traditions from the
pre-Socratics to Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Derrida, and to quote from,
or allude to, their works and statements, thus frankly placing one’s
own text within the traditions of knowledge, not, however, without
perpectivizing, ironizing and playing with them to the point of
74 From Modernism to Postmodernism

parody. This imparts a double coding both on the quotes from other
texts and the allusions to their ideas, as well as to one’s own text and
its argument. Postmodern fictional texts often are, in fact, “poignant
but playful [...] spinoffs from notable scientific or philosophical
propositions: Zeno’s paradoxes, Schrödinger’s wave-function
equations, whatever” (Barth OwS 149). We will come back to this
point in a special chapter.
A second way of opening the borderlines and keeping in
control at the same time is to play with the communication system
text, the interrelation between author, text, and reader, making them
positions both within and without the text, the one invading the
territory of the other. The author who should be outside his or her
creation appears as a character within the text (Sukenick, Up, Out;
Federman, Double or Nothing, The Voice in the Closet; Barth,
LETTERS); or the fictional characters who should be within the text
step outside to congratulate their author on his achievement
(Sukenick, Up); or the reader who should start reading only after he
has received the finished product appears within the text and reads it
while it is in progress, as though from the inside view of a character;
or the characters step over from an earlier text to a later one of their
author after they have negotiated the terms under which they will
allow the transfer. The author is now also a character within the text
and writes letters to, and receives letters from, his former and by now
again present protagonists (Barth, LETTERS); or the characters in a
novel within a novel are aware of and dissatisfied with the role that
their author has allotted them; they discuss the situation among
themselves, deceive their author about their identity out of spite, and
even think of leaving the novel for a better “job”(Sorrentino,
Mulligan Stew).
The third case is more complicated in that the relationship
between dependency and autonomy is made the central theme of the
book. The social context and its discourses as the “other”, the
outside, the uncontrollable, are objectified as a powerful, intrusive,
all-controlling Institution within the text. This method “borrows”
material from the social environment, and, for instance, makes the
allegedly all-determining, corrupting and exploitative Capitalist
System, the great topic of the “crisis theorists”, into a crucial issue of
the text, albeit in an abstracted and demonized, dramatized and
psychologized form which includes the effect of the power system on
Postmodern Culture, Aesthetics, and the Arts 75

people and their response and creates the dialectic matrix of (the
System’s) power and (the character’s) resistance (cf. Pynchon,
Coover, Hawkes, Sorrentino, Vonnegut, and others). This interaction
has its own ineluctable logic and creates therefore a very strong
design for a revival of plot (as something “plotted”), and for the
constitution of character as both alienated and resistant, since, to
refer to Foucault again, power by inner necessity calls up resistance,
in fact would not exist without resistance, which is its other side or
alter ego. This dialectic of power and resistance can be radicalized in
global terms as anticipation of apocalypse or entropy, and in
psychological terms as paranoia — paralleled in the lifeworld by the
experience of the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the threat of the
atomic bomb, and the vision of the impending end of the world, all
basic, determining components of the postwar period’s zeitgeist.
Though these feelings may again be played with and ironized, they
bring into the texts the issues of anxiety and pain, loss and death, the
existential underside of postmodern fiction, its open depth dimension
under the surface of inventions. Mailer writes in “The White Negro”,
“our collective condition is to live with instant death by atomic
war”(243); and Alfred Kazin (in his The Bright Book of Life)
maintains that what Heller, Pynchon, Vonnegut, and others of the
postwar period are really writing about, even though their locale is
Germany, World War II, New York, or California, is the hidden
history of the time, the threatening apocalypse, the “Next War”, “a
war that will be without limits and without meaning, a war that will
end when no one is alive to fight it”(qtd. in Howard 265). Yet in spite
of all this seriousness, by choosing, imparting, and changing the
perspectives on the theme, by keeping the balance between power
and resistance, uncertainty and certainty, the artist (who thus comes
into existence after all) asserts his or her dominance over theme and
form.
Since life cannot be thought of without a depth view —if
nothing else death supplies the empty spot below the surface — the
fourth way to give the text its own uniqueness, while acknowledging
its dependence on the discourses of the time, is to build up another
dialectic, that between surface and depth. Even if the surface
phenomena of the narrative argument are influenced or determined
by the socio-cultural condition and its discourses, the depth view can
be, as it were, the anchor of the text. It can take on this function
76 From Modernism to Postmodernism

because it is no longer defined in ideological terms that are


transferred or transferable from outside, as an essence, a center, a
center of the universe or the self, or an essentializing form, but is
couched in uncertainty, appears “under erasure”, to use Derrida’s
term that he takes from Heidegger and that denotes the paradoxical
state of something present in absence. This complex and confusing
presence-absence relationship is the anthropological foundation of
the postmodern paradoxical worldview, which, by dramatizing the
tension between being and nonbeing, presence and absence, surface
and void, the text and the blank, establishes the basic operational
configuration of postmodern fiction, the paradox. The paradoxical
formation of the fundamentals of the human condition marks the
unstable and contradictory state of knowledge, the fluid status of the
created world, the relation between outside and inside, and thus also
the problem of intertextuality. The aesthetic of the paradox, its
expansion into the overall compositional principle of the text, make it
possible to designate in antithetical formations the contradictions and
basic uncertainties of the time, including the textual ones, without
getting captured in the dilemma of modernist fiction, i.e., being
caught in, and finally restricted to, the by now clichéd theme of
alienation, whose extreme domination does not allow a wider spread
of perspectives and enforces a by now heavily contested,
essentializing concept of identity, an utter seriousness of tone, and
the traditional and pre-formed structure of the quest (exceptions only
confirming the rule).
This postmodern paradox is a special kind of figuration,
since it does not allow, as the modernist paradox still does, any kind
of synthesis and resolution, not even personal awareness as
subjective resolution, and embraces the gap, the void as indissoluble
“middle” part between the two segments, the contradictory positions
of the paradox. The void and the gap may be covered by the flood of
inventions but cannot be relinquished; they are always there, but only
latently there; in fact “the void”, as it were, lies “[o]n the other side
of a novel” (Gass 1970, 49). This is a very stimulating constellation.
Since the depth view is kept open, open for multiple perspectives,
even for play, irony and the comic mode (without losing its
existential weight), it does not dominate everything else, but leaves
the author a remarkable freedom of range, of roaming widely. Such a
constellation means that the inventive games on the surface are not
Postmodern Culture, Aesthetics, and the Arts 77

determined by one-sided, finally stultifying (modernist) concepts of


essence, truth, identity, and art. Yet it also means that, though the
liberated space of energetics of the postmodern text transcends the
ground-situation of the modernist text, i.e., the feeling of alienation,
loss and disorientation by the play of the artifice, it cannot finally
overcome the feeling of defamiliarization and estrangement. They
are elementary aspects of being in the world —a circumstance that
underlines the discontinuity/continuity relationship between
postmodernism and modernism. In postmodern fiction, this
psychological alienation theme is fused with an “internal”, textual
alienation issue, a problem of “hostile” intertextuality that concerns
the fictional existence of the narrator or character. They fear for their
“reality” status within the text, the narrator being unsure if he is
“really” the narrator, the creator of his world, or if he himself is again
being narrated, together with his narrated world, by another narrator,
while this second narrator may again be narrated by a third one, and
so on ad infinitum (Borges, “The Circular Ruin;” Sorrentino,
Mulligan Stew).
This is an aesthetic of complexity, of the paradox and the
gap, which in its dissemination of meaning, its contradictions and
absences — beyond all conventions and influences and beyond all
creative assertions of independence and innovation — ultimately
aims at representing the unpresentable, the ineffable, where power
and resistance meet. There are obviously two fundamentally different
ways to respond to the ineffable in the human condition. They are
represented by the philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Martin
Heidegger. While Cassirer assigned philosophy the task of dealing
with the results of the sciences — or rather the various frameworks
of knowledge — and of inquiring after their cultural unity, Heidegger
aimed at problems, which would never be answered by any of the
sciences, because concepts like truth, freedom and eternity exhibit
the limitation of human understanding. Literature chooses one of the
two approaches. Even though there are fundamental differences
between philosophy and art, it is true, as Gass notes, that “the
principles that govern constructions are persistently philosophical”,
and that “no novel [is]without its assumptions” (1970, 17, 23). Under
these premises, but with all necessary reservations and the
knowledge that there are no clear-cut boundaries in fiction, one
might assign the more traditional authors like Bellow, Malamud,
78 From Modernism to Postmodernism

Updike, Roth, and others, to the tradition of Cassirer (Philosophy of


Symbolic Forms), and the postmodern writers to Heidegger’s
approach to the basic human problems in Being and Time (we
remember the interpretation of postmodern art in Heidegger’s terms
by Spanos and others in the Sixties). Postmodern fiction, however,
adds to the existential stance its disbelief in rationalism and progress,
in the conciliation of antitheses by culture, and in idealistic positions
in general, the belief in the freedom of the imaginary, of perspective
and play, which modify the fundamentals of existentialism
considerably and give them a different tone (more about this point
later).
Finally, we need to refer to Derrida’s concept of literature as
force, as energy without borderlines, a notion that practically
suspends the concept of literature as a specific type of text. Since
every text opens itself to the other text, also the non-literary text,
literature for Derrida loses its boundaries as an aesthetic system of its
own: “there is no essence of literature, no truth of literature, no
literary being or being literary of literature” (1988a, 102). Literature
and art in this view have no fixed sites; on the contrary, literature and
art are self-reflexively situated in an in-between, as a force that is
able and is meant to energize all the other (sterile) discourses. This
may be considered an example of deconstructionist extremism that
has no great practical consequences though it has the charm and
stimulating power of absoluteness. But the deconstruction of
centralized structures and the “abstraction” of the literary quality
from the static text and its concretization as force, as the flow of
stimulating energy, vitalizing whatever it comes in contact with,
including the deconstructed/reconstructed literary text itself, goes a
long way to explain some of the extreme postmodern experiments,
especially those of Burroughs, Sukenick, and Federman, who try to
deconstruct whatever could be constructed into a system with a
rationalizable structure and definable borderlines, and to reconstruct
the text as a flow of energy, including the discontinuous, the
irrational, the uncontrollable, the gap, and the empty (white) space, in
short, the arbitrary and chaotic, a procedure which attempts to
suspend both socio-cultural, intertextual influences and the ego of the
author in favor of a representation of anonymous force, an analog of
the Life force.
Postmodern Culture, Aesthetics, and the Arts 79

2.5. Concepts of Aesthetics and the Opposition between


Modernism and Postmodernism

In our study the most comprehensive frame of reference is


aesthetics and the change of its concepts in history. Since aesthetics
has been one of the most versatile terms in philosophy, a short
overview of its conceptualizations may serve to place postmodern
aesthetics in historical perspective. Though the theory of art is much
older, the word “aesthetics” was introduced in the eighteenth century
by Alexander Baumgarten (Reflections on Poetry, 1734; Aesthetica,
2. vols. 1750, 1758). Aesthetics for him was “sensitive knowledge”,
the “cognitio sensitiva perfecta”, a meaning that Kant in some ways
relied on and that lately has been stressed again by Greimas (1987).
Since its advent as a separate philosophical discipline in the
eighteenth century and especially since the appearance of Kant’s
Critique of Judgment in 1790, aesthetics has attributed to literature
and the arts a decisive epistemological and social role. Disagreement
over the exact nature of this role, however, has been the source of the
ongoing and heated debate between essentialism and anti-
essentialism over the last two hundred years. The question is whether
literature and the arts constitute an absolute category or are
historically relative, whether they represent universal truth or the
changing concerns and interests of society, and whether they express
the essence of the human being or the contingencies and struggles of
historical existence.
Horace’s idea that literature is useful and pleasurable to the
reader receives its most fundamental variation and problematization
in the essentialism of Romanticism, which emphasizes concepts of
wholeness, permanence, truth, and the universality of Being, as
opposed to rational truth, morality, usefulness, geniality, and
elegance of style. The view that literature represents the essence of
life and history originates from the Romantic conviction that the
imagination is the highest human faculty of creation and synthesis,9
and that the arts are the foremost expressive modes of the
imagination. The essentialist concept of literature and the arts has
two aspects: one universal and one historical. Literature is a
universal phenomenon in that it exists in every period and every
society; relating to the core of life; it represents the universal laws of
nature and human existence. Literature is also universal in historical
80 From Modernism to Postmodernism

terms inasmuch as its appearance and its function differ according to


time and society; but still reflect the essences of the phases of history
and of national identities and their development. The first crisis in the
essentialist understanding of literature and the arts and their
relevance to society and history was set in motion by Hegel. Hegel
shattered the belief in the supposedly unchanging universality and
centrality of literature and the arts within the time-bound social
reservoir of expressive and communicative forms. In his theory of
aesthetics he spoke of his own time as the end of the age of art,10 as
the end, that is, of the ability of art and literature to represent the
essence of an age that is now dominated by reflection. In
historicizing the essentialist function of literature, Hegel placed its
historical aspect in the foreground. The essentialist, totalizing, and
integrating function of literature and the arts became a thing of the
past, namely a special characteristic of Greek antiquity and
“classical” periods of high literary achievement.
The notion that literature past and present could be seen and
judged from different perspectives allowed for the combination of
ideas of essence and history as change. Such a combination of rival
notions, however, made the selection and evaluation of literary facts
increasingly problematic, the more so as the social context lost its
common basis. The generally accepted common “high” culture (in
contrast to civilization) dispersed, as the unity of a religious and
metaphysical view of life and history broke up into what Max Weber
called the “process of rationalization” (34). This led to an increasing
independence of the various sectors of society, of science, morality
and law, art and culture, together with a differentiation of their
respective value systems. The cultural system detached itself from
the other spheres of social life — a fact that made the values of art
and society finally irreconcilable. Art uncoupled itself from the social
and economic systems, as far as that is possible, since it cannot
possibly escape from being a mirror of the social irreconcilabilities.
From Hegel on, aesthetics have mostly been the aesthetics of
negation; positive thinking often came to appear as anti-aesthetic.
Against “the power of positive thinking” Adorno sets “the
seriousness of unswerving negation” which “lies in its refusal to lend
itself to sanctioning things as they are” (1990, 186). What moves
dialectical thinking is pain and suffering, not joy and happiness:
“Conscious unhappiness is not a delusion of the mind’s vanity but
Postmodern Culture, Aesthetics, and the Arts 81

something inherent in the mind, the one authentic dignity it has


received in its separation from the body” (1990, 203). Though for the
modernist author like Adorno the disjunction between (social) reality
and art is an antagonism that allots literature a purely negative
function, a “negative commitment”, art does not indict the moral
deficits in the social world directly, since direct negation is
“profoundly inartistic”, i.e., anti-aesthetic. Explicit criticism is
always didactic and outer-directed; it is touched by and must argue in
terms of the criticized, and it thus violates the autonomy of art. The
latter demands aesthetic distance via form, not only in relation to
society but also in relation to the subject, especially emotion, as T.S.
Eliot notes when he claims that “[t]he only way of expressing
emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’”
(1934a, 145). Stephen Spender in his book The Struggle of the
Modern, the first and highly influential systematic theory of
modernism in literature, in fact distinguishes the “‘moderns’ or
‘recognizers,’” who follow “A Vision of the Whole” (a chapter
heading), from the “‘contemporaries’ and the ‘non-recognizers,’”
with their “Voltairian I”, characterized by rationalism, “progressive
politics”, the wish to influence and change the world, while the
“modern I through receptiveness, suffering, passivity transforms the
world to which it is exposed”(x, 72).That the negative attitude
towards direct criticism of, and involvement with, society is still
wide-spread in the Sixties and Seventies exemplifies Derrida’s
warning that “we can pronounce not a single destructive proposition
which has not already had to slip into the form, the logic, the implicit
postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest”(1978, 280). The
deconstructionist theory, especially that of Derrida, propounds the
preference of rhetoric over logic, a free-ranging creation of meaning,
liberated from the encumbrance of confining presuppositions,
academic conventions and the postulate to solve problems and be
socially relevant, and instead remains in the process of perpetual
transcendence, of “Nietzschean affirmation, that is the joyous
affirmation of the play of the world and the innocence of becoming,
the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and
without origin which is offered to an active interpretation” (Derrida
1978, 292).
In respect to the cathartic hermetism of modern art, a crucial
turning-point away from the self-enclosure of aesthetics was reached
82 From Modernism to Postmodernism

when meanings and pleasures split. Meanings in modern aesthetics


adhere to permanence in change, purity amidst impurity, freedom
amidst a lack of freedom. The modernists relegate pleasure to the
enjoyment of the clichés, lies and sentimentalities of official culture
and the facticities of social practice, to non-serious literature and art,
to kitsch, “as if”, as Roland Barthes puts it, “the notion of pleasure no
longer pleases anyone” (1975, 46-47). In modernist aesthetic culture,
in contrast to its opposite, “civilization”,11 the expectation that
literature will generate comforting pleasure is, again according to
Barthes, “continually disappointed, reduced, deflated, in favor of
strong, noble values: Truth, Death, Progress, Struggle, Joy, etc”.
(1975, 57). Pleasure is sublimated into aesthetic satisfaction and seen
to originate, in I.A. Richards’s words, from “intricately wrought
composure” and an “equilibrium of opposed impulses” (197). It
results from the formation of aesthetic awareness, which now takes
on ethical value. The refusal of the modernist to mix meaning with
pleasure leads to a dead end. Nevertheless, the elitist concept of
literary meaning and the opposition of literature and kitsch remained,
at least until the Sixties, the standard in literary theory and criticism.
Adorno and Horkheimer denounce the mass culture of the “culture
industry” with its “bloated pleasure apparatus” performing an
“automatic succession of standardized operations”. This apparatus
may remove unpleasant tensions and give immediate satisfaction, yet
it “hardens into boredom” because it does “not demand any effort
and therefore moves rigorously in the worn grooves of association”
(137). The task of high literature and art, according to Lionel
Trilling, is to attain “the negative transcendence of the human, a
condition which is to be achieved by freeing the self from its
thralldom to pleasure” (65).
It has become obvious that these clear-cut boundaries
between high literature and popular literature or kitsch, between texts
that are structurally oriented and supposedly provide cognition, and
reader-oriented texts that give pleasure and allow release from the
hard facts of life no longer hold, and this even less so in America
than in Europe. The European tradition of essentializing culture and
art is of course important for America as well, but there are also
differences. In the US, the lack or “softness” of an established canon
of high literature and art has always made possible flexible
interrelations between popular and sophisticated modes of discourse.
Postmodern Culture, Aesthetics, and the Arts 83

The market and its modish change of interest have played a much
larger role in the definition of culture and in deciding what culture
offers than in Europe. Pleasure in America’s cultural scenario was
not rigidly rejected the way it was in the elitist cultural concept that
Europe held, with its focus on the “essential”. As a matter of fact,
America has made manifest the claim that culture can be hedonistic
and, as such, provide entertainment and spectacle. Yet it also
demonstrates that in a pleasure-oriented culture there are still written
— more than ever — highly complex literary texts which seem to
find their audience, in spite of Barth’s “worrying about the death of
the reader” (1995, 122). In this double tendency, there seems to be
hidden a more general, transnational rule, according to which the
different cultural levels interact. The development of literature and
the arts in the twentieth century (towards meta-fiction and
abstraction) shows that whenever the semantically structured
aesthetic text becomes hermetically closed in its “purity”, when,
supported by a highbrow culture, it turns elitist as a privileged mode
of representation and interpretation, and does not heed the
requirements of the cultural environment at large, such as social
information and analysis, pleasure and entertainment, the moment
comes, when the environment, strengthened by a de-hierarchization
of culture, “reacts” by relativizing or disregarding the complex
experimental literary text. Conversely, if the borderlines between
literary discourse and the cultural become too fluid, and the
possibility marking deficits of meaning and thus of opposing the
environmental givens is too radically reduced, then there is a re-
constitution of the primacy of the artistic artifact, of the aesthetic
system as the other, “since meaning always arises in closed contexts”
(Luhmann 1987, 314).
Postmodern literature and art are the result of such a
reconstitution of the aesthetic system. The need to retain the both
distancing and engaging art perspective and its potential of otherness,
of transgressing the boundaries of the familiarizing culture at large,
and to keep open the space for the ineffable explains the continuing
creation of a highly complex and defamiliarizing literature, which, in
Barth’s terms, gives “all power to the individual [...] and direct
access to the invisible universe of sensibility”, conveys “the
experiencing of human experience” (1995, 365, 364). This effect
comes to pass in spite of the dehierarchization of the cultural field,
84 From Modernism to Postmodernism

the multiplication of the forms of communication and information,


and the advance of the electronic visual media, the decrease in
readership of the art novel, and of the cultural status or rather social
effect of complex art. The loss of the shamanic role, however, may
have a liberating influence on the artist, who both seriously and with
irony may say, in Barth’s words from On With the Story: “An end to
endings! Let us rebegin!”(14).
To rebegin of course means to be conscious of an ending.
The regeneration of art thus always takes place by contending with
the past, with the achievements and ideologies and limitations of
one’s predecessors. It was the exposure of the contradictions in
modern art — its utopian and totalitarian streak, the discrepancies in
the concept of totalizing form and the cracks in the vision of the
whole, indeed the failures in the attempt of encapsulating the
unbounded and fragmented and chaotic within the discipline of form
— that led to a new beginning within the literary series started by
modern (romantic) art. The discovery of the incongruities in modern
aesthetics relativized the most important value standard of (modern)
art, namely the equivalence of content and form or, more
specifically, the fusion of opposites in the irony of form, irony being
responsible for ambiguity and contrast, and the wholeness of form,
designed for conciliation and unity. It is a combinatory standard
which demands two contrary, in fact mutually exclusive, things. In
spite of this inconsistency high modernism makes their integration
the criterion for the value of the individual text: (1) it fosters the
inclusion within the meaningful form of as many of the tensions,
contradictions and ambiguities of life, history, morals, truth, in short,
of the cultural discourses and counter-discourses, as possible (the
more complex the better), expressed in what already Friedrich
Schlegel, the German romantic critic, called the “irony of form”, a
phrase that was adopted by the New Critics, especially Cleanth
Brooks, and (2) it strives for the containment of ambiguity and
disorder, chaos and force in the structural wholeness of form,
representing “the vision of the whole” (Spender). Referring to Eliot’s
Wasteland, Cleanth Brooks expresses the standard modernist view on
the relation between chaos and order. Their aesthetic interrelation
allows a maximum of “conflicting elements”, of the “discordant”, the
“amorphous and the heterogeneous and contradictory”, yet only for
the purpose of uniting them under the auspices of aesthetic form.
Postmodern Culture, Aesthetics, and the Arts 85

Eliot’s “application of [...] complexity” thus also serves only to “give


the effect of chaotic experience ordered into a new whole” (Brooks
1937; 39, 40, 43, 167). A modernist like Virginia Woolf accepts
chaos merely as something that has to be transferred into aesthetic
synthesis: “the irregular fire must be there; and perhaps to lose it one
must begin by being chaotic, but not appear in public like that”
(1973,74). The contradictions are obvious; thus the stage is set for an
explosion of form, carried out by the avantgarde already in the
modern era, by Dadaists and Surrealists, and then by the
poststructuralists in postmodern times, whose deconstructive turn
influenced and accompanied the development of postmodern art,
without being coaxial with it. The views of the deconstructionists
mark the crisis of both traditional theory and art.
With the poststructuralists aesthetics and aesthetic theory
extend beyond the boundaries that define the aesthetic system and
beyond the theory that proclaims the autonomy of art. As mentioned,
the aesthetic becomes a force, a kind of vitality put into all rigid
theories, thus exposing their limitations and energizing their
activities. The expansion of radical, critical aesthetics beyond the
aesthetic system makes it a deconstructive aesthetic force (acting
against theoretical as well as aesthetic closure on the purely aesthetic,
not a cultural basis); it thus complements, as it were, and “revokes”
the extension and “emptying” of formalist aesthetics into the
decorative, cultural aesthetic of the environment and vice versa. The
aesthetic force that the poststructuralists speak of is arbitrary,
fragmented, irrational, disruptive, and without implication and need
of the possibility of reconciliation or redemption (for which, Derrida
says, Adorno was still striving). Believing in the fruitlessness of a
reform of philosophy, history, and political theory from within and
following Nietzsche’s claim that art is the “countermovement” to the
“decadence forms” of humanity (qtd. in Carroll 1987, 24), Foucault,
Derrida, and Lyotard, though in quite different ways, use the radical
exteriority of art to philosophy, history, and politics in order “to
deconstruct everything that presents itself as an order, to show that
‘order’ conceals something else, something that is repressed in this
order” (Lyotard 1984a, 29), and to free the space for the “pleasure of
infinite creation” (Culler 1976, 248). The aesthetic force brings about
“the disarrangement of the arrangement that produces signification”.
It displaces all repressive concepts of writing, overcomes the narrow
86 From Modernism to Postmodernism

ideas of identity, reveals the repressed or hidden “other”, and


“disrupts communication” (cf. 1971, 68-69). Aesthetics, always a
disruptive force, is aligned with the figural, metaphorical, the
heterogeneous, unbounded, and unfulfilled as well as the
transgressive, libidinal force of “desire”; it is transformed into radical
energetics, into excess, a struggle of dispersive movements and
counter-movements; in the sublime it presents the “unpresentable”,
and harbors the “incommunicable” (Lyotard). Aesthetics generates a
spontaneous doubling of language, a proliferation of the fantastic,
and a liberation of the unstable from the stable (in representation),
the incomplete from the complete, the discontinuous from the
continuous (in history and discourse), the “illogical” or even
“madness” from logic and (social) order, the other from the rule of
the same. Literature and art are subversive, displace the subject and
its form, and reflect the movement and struggle in the field of forces,
the power-knowledge network; they mark the absence of order and
reach the limit at the abyss, the absolute void of being underlying all
systems of order.
By radicalizing the critical-aesthetic function of literature or
rather literariness, the latter becomes disruptive to the extreme,
dismantles epistemology, ontology, religion and established order,
also aesthetic order, and searches for alternative possibilities, for
whatever fits into “libidinal”, “critical”, “experimental”, and “self-
reflexive” aesthetics or aesthetics of “crisis”, “displacement”,
“absence”, “violence”, or “madness”. Aesthetics or literariness,
existing as much outside the aesthetic system as inside, and turning
into the energetics of force, a disruptive power, dissolves form and
structure also of the literary text, and transforms them into temporal
processes, into “play and difference”. “Form”, according to Derrida,
“fascinates when one no longer has the force to understand force
from within itself. That is, to create” (1978, 4- 5). “Différance” with
its dual meaning of “difference” and “deferral” (1988a) is “neither a
word nor a concept”, but is in fact “strategic” and “irreducibly
multivalent” (1973, 130, 131, 137). It renders the text unstable and
indeterminate, deferring its meaning endlessly. For Derrida, literature
in its higher, self-reflexive form is a privileged but disguised
entryway into writing: it provides a limit case, a critical perspective,
which, since there are only hybrid, not self-contained forms of
writing, exists as much inside as outside, as much within literature
Postmodern Culture, Aesthetics, and the Arts 87

and theory as between them. It can, however, only serve the task of
pushing philosophy and other “rational” discourses beyond its
traditional delineations when it is in crisis, i.e., contains irresolvable
contradictions that lead to “undecidability” and even “unreadability”
(Derrida). Yet when the communicative limits are reached, “this
unreadability does not arrest reading”, but rather “starts reading and
writing and translation moving again” (1979a, 116) with alternative
strategies, which, pushing towards and displacing the limits of
literature and theory, never come to an end. This foregrounding of
force instead of form calls for a mobile, a “nomadic” (Deleuze,
Foucault) way of thinking, writing, and existing. Foucault’s advice
runs as follows: “to prefer what is positive and multiple, difference
over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over
systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but
nomadic” (1984, xiii).
The one-sidedness, as well as the inherent contradictions and
restrictions, limit this deconstructionist concept of critical/explosive
literariness; they restrain, if not its value, then its scope or, rather,
applicability. But they exhibit in the ideology of extremity the
counter-concept to the modern wholeness of form: the demand for an
energetic fragmentation of form — though, interestingly enough,
art’s function is the same as in modernism: namely, to defamiliarize
and subvert. This radically open view of literariness also dramatizes
the tensions in aesthetics, which are evident at least since Nietzsche
if not before in romanticism: the inherent conflict between criticism
(of the reified, clichéd norms of society and the dualisms of thought
and ethics), and the acceptance of life in all its forms and the
tolerance of multiplicity in general. This is the reason that the
theorists who write about the poststructuralists cannot agree if the
latter are primarily “aestheticians” or critics of society and culture.
As to literature, this deconstructionist aestheticism, if one wants to
call it that, is confined to the experimental and self-reflexive
literature of crisis, displacement, absence, violence, or madness. It
defines literature not by its structure but by its disruptive function.
And it propagates the excess of contradictoriness and most willingly
embraces “unreadability”, paying no attention whatsoever to the
communication pole of literature, hoping against all hope to force
readers into new, unclichéd ways of thinking and feeling.
88 From Modernism to Postmodernism

There are obviously parallels and differences between


poststructuralism and postmodernism in terms of literature. To speak
of parallels first: One can make out at least four ideas that are
common to both poststructuralism and postmodern fiction: (1) order
represses disorder, therefore order has to include chaos; (2) all
positions are multivalent; the attempt at control of difference faces
undecidability as a theme; (3) the forms of stasis need to be
energized into dynamis; meaning is disseminated in the flow of time;
(4) literature represents the incomplete, the illogical, the un-
representable and incommunicable and requires new strategies of
defamiliarization, up to the shock effect of extremity and excess, of
unreadability. The differences evolve from the poststructuralist
critique of structure. As Niall Lucy notes: “for poststructuralism (1)
the nature of literature in general is such that there can never be any
hard and fast distinction between orders of literature-in-particular
that might be understood in terms of ‘closed’ and ‘open’ systems
(realism and meta-fiction, say), and (2) the nature of creating-in-
general is such that there never can never be any hard and fast
distinction between so-called literary and non-literary orders of
writing-in-particular” (Nial Lucy, Postmodern Literary Theory 121).
As a result of the focus of their critique on structuredness and
centeredness, the poststructuralists do not refer to the build-up of
narrative-in-particular. Yet the postmodern fiction writers write
narratives-in-particular, even if Gass notes, “[m]y stories are
malevolently anti-narrative”, because, again in Gass’s words, “the
aesthetic aim of any fiction is the creation of a world” (1970, 18),
and the writer’s “energy [is] employed in the activity of making”, the
making of “something supremely worthwhile, […] something
inherently valuable in itself”. Thus the questions have to be faced of
how to combine force and form, how to “control each scene as it
develops” (Gass 1996, 35, 45), how to reconstruct the text after
deconstruction, how to communicate what is to be expressed —
though the term expression is not much liked by the postmodern
writers. The extreme poststructuralist positions have almost nothing
to say about how to make fiction: they can only be instructive
guidelines and stimuli for limit cases, such as we have discussed
before in connection with the art series and its development to
extremes and excess. What is needed is a new conceptual direction;
Postmodern Culture, Aesthetics, and the Arts 89

what is achieved is a conceptional system of considerable complexity


that combines narrative and “anti-narrative” strategies.

2.6. Aesthetics and Ethics: The Aesthetic Attitude and the Value
of Experience

The aesthetic of postmodern fiction obviously needs a wider


understanding of the aesthetic mode and artistic discourse than
poststructuralism can provide; it aims for a concept that is
antiauthoritarian, inclusive specifically of experiments with popular
culture, with the ironic and comic modes, one that is more tolerant of
traditions and of the manifoldness of possibilities, and that rejects
none of them, though it transforms all of them. As mentioned,
aesthetics has two poles, criticism of fixities and acceptance of
plurality. With an exuberant sense of new possibilities, the
postmodern writers stress the latter pole, which stands for inclusion,
for tolerance also of the non-extreme, not-crisis- like, even rational,
of the context of multiplicity. It is one of the paradoxes of
postmodern art that its texts and artifacts often experiment with the
limit, are in fact limit cases, while the ideologies they are based on
propagate inclusiveness, multiplicity and tolerance. The attitude that
sustains and conveys this wide-ranging orientation towards plurality
we call the aesthetic attitude. It is the third area or aspect of the
postmodern aesthetic (the first and the second being the aesthetic of
the autonomous artistic discourse and the cultural aesthetic of the
environment). If for heuristic purposes we here separate
deconstruction from reconstruction — though in practice they are of
course inseparable — the aesthetic attitude is responsible primarily
for reconstruction. The aesthetic attitude is actually nothing new; it
has its origin in Kant’s notion of the disinterestedness of the
(reflective) aesthetic judgment, which functions in the absence of
fixed values and predetermined rules, and resists theoretical closure
from within, as well as in Nietzsche’s rejection of the Western two-
dimensional scheme of thought, his discrediting of the hubris of
human reason and its dualisms, and his call for a non-essentializing
conception of the world that accepts it aesthetically in all its variety
and energy.12 Flexibility in viewpoint is the reason that, since
Nietzsche, aesthetics has come to the fore.
90 From Modernism to Postmodernism

The aesthetic attitude gains special importance for


postmodernism, in all its sectors of understanding, culture, theory
and the arts, because it broadens the outlook, energizes
comprehension, and joins perspectives. For Susan Sontag, for
instance, aesthetics and ethics combine: “art is moral, insofar, as it is,
precisely, the enlivening of our sensibility and consciousness [...] Art
performs this moral task because the qualities which are intrinsic to
the aesthetic experience (disinterestedness, attentiveness, the
awakening of feelings) and to the aesthetic object (grace,
intelligence, expressiveness, energy, sensuousness) are also
fundamental constituents of a moral response to life” (25). The
aesthetic attitude finds its privileged place in art, and in the aesthetic
experience that art furnishes. Yet it reaches beyond the experience of
art. What Barth proposes for the replenishment of art, the recycling
and reevaluation of its traditional forms, already presupposes a
further distancing and balancing of the mind beyond aesthetic
experience in the narrative sense, a reflexive-stance aesthetic that
compares, connects, and redirects and thus is more general and
“abstract” than the immediate aesthetic experience of the literary text
from which it emerges. Relying both on aesthetic experience and
aesthetic reflection, the reflexive aesthetic creates an aesthetic
attitude. The aesthetic attitude, however, is not confined to the realm
of art. It spreads and takes on many forms and functions, also outside
the arts. It has meanwhile broadened its scope to such an extent that
one speaks of an aesthetic of history, of sociology or even physics.13
In its various appearances, the aesthetic attitude is averse to
generalizations; it directs the attention to the particularity and the
plurality of forms of life, includes the experience of relativity and
manifoldness, contingency and the local/historical (instead of
universal or eternal) determination of codes. It is not directed
towards principles that guarantee a “rightness” of behavior but
towards decisions that have to be made according to circumstances in
concrete situations (see Caputo 1993), a concept that implies has the
radical conclusion that there can be no “right” behavior according to
general rules. Though the aesthetic attitude does not incline towards
the absoluteness of determining principles, it has in its unwillingness
to tolerate ideologies (also the ideologies of poststructuralism)
nevertheless an ethical function, in spite of the fact that some of the
critical theorists of postmodernism suggest the contrary. In
Postmodern Culture, Aesthetics, and the Arts 91

complicating and relativizing ethical issues by attending to the


singularity and heterogeneity of situations, the aesthetic stance only
expresses the current contradictory notions of truth and ethical
evaluations. It marks the weakening of religious beliefs and the belief
in a wise and unchanging nature as a substitute for God or in the
tribunal of History, its justice and guarantee of progress. Ethics,
which is now without an essentialist foundation as a meta-discourse,
and indeed also the ethics of the literary text, gains through the
aesthetic attitude a profile of tolerance and self-reflexivity. With a
contemplative composure, tempered with responsibility but without
abstract anxiety and false emotionality (a position whose pluralism
lies before all morality but in fact includes practical reason), the
aesthetic attitude is able to incorporate a mixture of sensuous
approach and comprehending judgment, of distance and engagement,
hedonistic pleasure and outgoing sympathy. Such a negotiating
function of the aesthetic attitude, cultivating a space in between (as
postmodern art does), can help to lessen (not dissolve) the tensions
within ethics by restraining totalizing ideologies, by supporting a
kind of local-area ethics (e.g., ecological or environmental ethics),
and by discounting binary oppositions or mediating between
polarizing principles like sameness and difference, familiarity and
otherness, or power and resistance. In the aesthetic attitude, ethics
and aesthetics enter a kind of partnership. The result of the
combination is a conglomerate that is open to varying emphasis, of
course also to debasement. It establishes an ethics of tolerance, which
in America finds its social and political correlative in
multiculturalism; it mediates among cultural levels.
The aesthetic attitude allows the postmodern writer to
include the widest possible contradictions into a unity of multiplicity,
such as continuity and discontinuity, disparity and coherence,
simplicity and complexity, sequence and simultaneity, causality and
arbitrariness, culture and nature, and also autonomy and
intertextuality. Postmodern fiction’s struggle and play with endless
possibilities that relativize or swallow up actualities is an expression
of the aesthetic attitude, now turned towards narrative world-
building, towards reflections of characters and narrators, and meta-
fictional considerations of the artistic process and its meaning. The
shift of perspectives from anxiety and pain to irony and the comic
mode is another significant demonstration of the workings of the
92 From Modernism to Postmodernism

pluralistic aesthetic view. Barth’s story “Night-Sea Journey”, with its


dramatized, albeit also comic anxieties and all-round reflections of a
spermatozoon on its way through a woman’s vagina to the egg cell
and certain death; or his “Menelaiad”, with Menelaus doubting,
surmising, speculating what his wife Helena’s feelings for him are;
or Gass’s Omensetter’s Luck, thematizing innocence and experience
and their interlockings; or the endless reflections of Gass’s
protagonist, the professor of history, in The Tunnel, who is not able
to finish his book on the Nazi concentration camps; or the multiple
endings of Coover’s story “The Baby Sitter”— all these and a host of
other postmodern narratives are examples of how the aesthetic
attitude is both exercised and for narrative purposes problematized
and dramatized according to what Barth calls the narrative schema,
consisting of a “Ground-situation [uncertainty] and a Dramatic
Vehicle [multiplicity]” (OwS 36). As these fictions demonstrate, the
inclusiveness of the aesthetic attitude induces it to include also its
own opposite, the opposite of balance and conciliation. The aesthetic
view is not only conciliatory but also marks the irreconcilable
contrariness of positions, too, even the contrariness of aesthetics and
ethics, yet not in terms of static concepts but in a continuous process
of reflection, of adjustment and re-adjustment, in the interplay of
deconstruction and reconstruction. The ultimate form of this process
is the paradox.
But this aestheticizing of postmodern fiction, not only of its
form but also of its content, is not only the source of its regeneration
but also the major target of all the attacks against its so-called self-
reflexivity and narcissism. This antagonism, however, has to be seen
in a wider context, the aesthetics-vs.-ethics debate in general, which
is used to accuse the aesthetic attitude of a distancing posture. The
aesthetic stance, for instance, is made responsible for the
“aestheticizing” of the Enlightenment and its unfinished project of
modernity (Habermas), which, it is said, appears in hindsight as
“sublime” or “heroic” but no longer as simply “true” or “relevant” or
urgent in terms of social change. In another context, the aesthetic of
art and the concept of aesthetics in general are allegedly fed
(debased, as its critics maintain) by the cultural aesthetic of the
environment and its hedonism, the undiscriminating consumption of
goods, information, fashions, and lifestyle. Paul DeMan, the coiner
of the term “aesthetic ideology”, maintains that “the aesthetic [in
Postmodern Culture, Aesthetics, and the Arts 93

contrast to the “linguistics of literariness”] is, by definition, a


seductive notion that appeals to the pleasure principle” (DeMan
1986, 64). We remember here the derogatory remarks of the theorists
of modernism about pleasure. It is furthermore assumed that the
aestheticization of the self, on whatever level, separates the faculties
of action and reflection, and thus splits or deactivates the person. The
conservative sociologist Daniel Bell in his The Cultural
Contradictions of Capitalism speaks of the destructive effect on
society of an exhausted and self-reflexive “adversary [aestheticized
high] culture”, which rebels against the normality of everyday life,
against the morally and socially good and the practically useful in the
name of the unlimited demand for self-fulfillment and authentic self-
realization of the individual. Critics of our media landscape complain
that politics is aestheticized, and that the aesthetics of show business
and the spectacle fill the public realm. In hindsight historians connect
fascism with an aestheticization of politics that makes the leader an
artist and the masses the passive object of his “creative” impulse.
The Marxist critic Terry Eagleton, for his part, speaks of “the
aesthetic”, as the “language of political hegemony of an imaginary
consolation for the bourgeoisie bereft of a home”, though he
acknowledges its potential for a “utopian critique of the bourgeois
social order” (1988, 337). Gerald Graff condemns postmodern
fictional texts because they “become either a self-contained [i.e.,
purely aesthetic] reality unto itself or a disintegrated, dispersed [i.e.,
aesthetic or, rather, anti-aesthetic] process”, while in our difficult
times, when “the importance and truth of literature” is deflated by
“the conspiracy of external forces”, it should be the purpose of
literature “to shore up the sense of reality” (9), which would mean of
course that literature (alone?) knows and can teach the world what
reality and truth are. As Martin Jay notes: “In this cluster of uses, the
aesthetic is variously identified with irrationality, illusion, fantasy,
myth, sensual seduction, the imposition of will, and inhumane
indifference to ethical, religious, or cognitive considerations” (74).
The positive comments on the aesthetic attitude generally
connect the aesthetic view with the ethical one. Adorno’s Aesthetic
Theory (1970) sees only in the radicalized aesthetic form (of a
Samuel Beckett or Paul Celan) an authentic and effective possibility
of resistance against the all-present grip of mass culture and its
mentor, the logic of capitalism. Susan Sontag relies on an
94 From Modernism to Postmodernism

“uncompromising aesthetic experience of the world”. She holds that


“the divorce between the aesthetic and the ethical is meaningless”,
and announces that “the world is ultimately an aesthetic
phenomenon” (Against Interpretation, l961, 28). Not surprisingly,
the writing of history is seen in terms of aesthetics. Hayden White
speaks of the necessity for historiography to work with aesthetic
designs that create meaning through contrast. (1974). The theologian
Wolfgang Huber thinks it necessary “to regain an aesthetic
relationship to the environment” (29). Frederic Jameson speaks of the
necessity to undertake what he calls “an aesthetic of cognitive
mapping” (1992, 89). Mike Featherstone notes that “the shift to
aesthetic criteria and local knowledge may just as possibly lead to
mutually expected self-restraint and respect for the other” (126).
Joseph Margolis has at last claimed, from the viewpoint of the early
Eighties, that “aesthetics is the most strategically placed philosophic
discipline of our time” (1980, 174). Confirming the importance of the
aesthetic perspective, A. Megill considers Nietzsche, Heidegger,
Foucault, and Derrida as “aestheticists”, who expand “the aesthetic to
embrace the whole of reality” (2).14 One might add in this context that
Nietzsche and Heidegger, as well as later thinkers such as Foucault,
Derrida and Lyotard (see Carroll 1987), replace “strong” meta-
concepts of man-imposed order like origin, continuity, causality and
teleology with more “tolerant” and “weaker” (one might add,
aesthetic) ones (see Vattimo 1988) like simultaneity, discontinuity,
complementarity, and complexity. As mentioned, the postmodern
writers have adopted the aesthetic attitude both as principle of
composition and as principle of creating meaning.
The relativization of the modernist art standard, the
expansion of aesthetics beyond the discourse of art into the cultural
aesthetics of the environment, and a general leveling of the criteria of
evaluation have led to grave uncertainties as to what art is and what
art’s function is. The attempt to hold on to a humanistic art concept
explains the harsh reactions of the more traditional critics against
postmodern fiction and postmodern art in general, against their
alleged lack of a consensual interpretation of the world, their
rejection of a (rational) concept of order as a criterion of evaluating
chaos. For the first time (besides certain philosophical reservations
towards the function of art since Hegel and the Dada movement), not
only a specific kind of (avantgarde) art was criticized but the
Postmodern Culture, Aesthetics, and the Arts 95

presuppositions and claims of art in general. This occurred not from


an outsider position but in an intellectual climate and a market-
oriented culture that were defined by the assumption that there was
no privileged way of communication and analysis, and that art was
one channel of communication among others and had to be culturally
defined. Thus the attack on postmodern art came from two sides,
from the humanistic modernist school and from the school of cultural
persuasion that propagated, explicitly or implicitly, the need of social
(or market) relevance.
Let us turn to the deconstruction of the art standard first.
With the relativization or abandonment of the modern combinatory
standards of irony of form (tensions, ambiguities, conflicts) and
wholeness of form (continuity, coherence, unity), art loses its own,
rather narrowly defined, intrinsic aesthetic standard for evaluating
artistic achievement and aesthetic meaning: the significant form, the
complex and totalizing art structure as the “objective correlative”
(T.S. Eliot) of both ambivalent and integrating meaning. It becomes
evident in comparison that there is no significant, unique
postmodernist theory of literature (and art in general) that could be
set against the attacks against fiction’s supposed “narcissism”. In
fact, it turns out that postmodern fiction in its self-understanding and
ultimate goals depends, in one way or another, on the modernist
ideology of defamiliarization and alienation. The change is one of
attitude. This interdependence explains and justifies, for instance,
Gass’s above-mentioned conclusion that the so-called postmodern
writers, including himself, were in fact late modernists, though it
does not justify the blurring of differences. After the early
controversies and the rigorous dominions of postmodern art in
contrast to modern art had abated in the later discussions, the
continuities between modernist and postmodernist fiction were
indeed recognized; mostly unrecognized, however, remained the fact
that postmodern fiction in fact fully satisfies the criteria of the
modernist art concept, the aforementioned combinatory standard of
irony of form and wholeness of form, though the new inclusive
“wholeness” of form was one of multiplicity, of perspectivism. The
irony of form manifests itself now in the blurring of categories, such
as reality and fiction, Being and Becoming, surface and depth,
uniqueness and multiplicity, the wholeness of form in the
combination of order and chaos as new unity. The modernist concept
96 From Modernism to Postmodernism

of combining ambiguity, tension and organic wholeness in form is


thus not simply dismissed, as some of the radical statements,
especially by Federman and Sukenick, might suggest, but the
tensions are radicalized and the notion of organic wholeness
expanded for the purpose of including both order and chaos —now
however no longer under the guidance of the logic of order as
ultimate principle of life and art but with disorder on an equal footing
with order. The consequence is that order can turn spontaneously into
chaos (and endless multiplicity) and chaos into order, the fictional
form’s now being prepared so as to make space for both and for their
metamorphoses (see the discussion of force and form as constituents
of the narrated situation below).
In addition to the problems originating from within the art
family and art theory, postmodern art faced the other problem,
namely how to retain or regain a significant place in the culture at
large. When art theory can no longer define art within the three
schemes that it has prepared for the evaluation of art — mimesis or
representation, imaginative expression of emotion and cognition, and
(unity of) organic form — art becomes open in its definition as art to
non-aesthetic criteria. Theodor Adorno begins his Aesthetic Theory
with the sentence: “It is now taken for granted that nothing which
concerns art can be taken for granted any more: neither art itself, nor
art in its relationship to the whole, nor even the right of art to exist”
(1984, 5). The theory of art has taken to heart this skepticism as to
the definition and status of art. In order to be on safer ground, it has
widened the perspective and made the study of art part of wide-
ranging cultural studies. They include non-aesthetic aspects in the
definition and evaluation of art.
One way to define art then, especially visual art, but
analogically verbal art as well, is the Institutional Theory, that is, “a
work of art means whatever has been put forward by an institution or
a relevant person” as a putative artwork (see Dickie 1964; Arthur
Danto 1964, 580; and The Transfiguration of the Commonplace); but
this notion does not break up the circle of definition since the art-
defining Institution again needs a reason for its performative act —
and this reason can only lie in the specific quality of aesthetic
experience, which, however, nobody can define in a way that
includes by common consensus in the visual arts the works of both
Rembrandt and Duchamp’s “Fountain”. George Dickie tries to
Postmodern Culture, Aesthetics, and the Arts 97

dissolve this circle by denying that the reception of art needs a


“special kind of aesthetic consciousness, attitude or perception”
(1964, ibid).15 For Dickie, appreciating an artwork is “something
like” saying that “‘in experiencing the qualities of a thing one finds
them worthy or valuable’” (1974, 40-41). He is not alone in his
deviation from the traditional definitions of art. Arthur Danto,
attempting to find criteria on which the artworld can base its
judgment, recurs to the modern non-aesthetic standard of innovation
or newness — “since any definition of art must comprise the Brillo
Boxes, it is plain that no such definition can be based upon an
examination of artworks” (1981, vi, 93).
In order to spare new art the struggles in the battlefield of
aesthetics, Timothy Binkley axiomatically separates aesthetics and
art, claiming that being aesthetic “is neither a necessary nor a
sufficient condition for being art” (32). Similarly, Bohdan Dziemidok
asserts that “contemporary artistic practice proves that it is possible
to create [...] works of art which completely (or almost completely)
lack aesthetic value of any kind” (15). When the structurally defined
aesthetic of art exhausts itself in the continuous search for newness
or succumbs to the marketplace, the (formerly) anti-aesthetic
paradoxically seizes the subversive function of the aesthetic and thus
becomes part of the aesthetic or, viewed another way, explodes the
aesthetic concept of form. This is not only the case with certain
trends of Pop art and with the Trash art of the Seventies and Eighties
but also with some of the excessively experimental novels of, for
instance, Abish, Federman, and Sukenick, which we discussed
above. All these considerations of art values finally lead to the
question of how long, under the changing cultural conditions, is the
allotted life-span of the artwork/novel and what the criteria are that
might explain differences in the durability of texts and artworks. The
answer becomes as much of a problem as the definition of art itself
(see Corzo).
Postmodern fiction counters the deconstruction of the
aesthetic value of the modern concepts of organic (“harmonizing”)
form by foregrounding experience, which combines content and form
more in terms of process and flow than in terms of structure. It links
in the fluidity of force and form the representation of experience in
the text and the experience of the text by the reader as something
procedural and fluid. This narrative tendency explains the new
98 From Modernism to Postmodernism

relevance of Dewey’s Art as Experience, which firmly grounds art


and the experience of art in the experience of life and tries to avoid
rigid systems of definitions. Foregrounding experience de-
emphasizes the (“spatial”) structure of the text and privileges the
temporal flow in the definition of art. “Experience” is actually an
unsatisfying notion, yet it is an open term that is not narrowly
circumscribable, not readily subjectable to a summary, a hierarchy,
and ideology. It does not separate language and world; in fact it fuses
the linguistic process and the dynamics of the imaginary world. And
it includes the other facets of narrative, simultaneity, plurality and
empty spaces in-between. In addition, experience is able to describe
in one term the mental activity that is happening on all three levels of
the communication-process text: the author, the artifact, and the
reader. Federman remarks that what he is looking for and trying to
offer in The Voice in the Closet is “the essential of the closet
experience of my childhood. It is that essential, and not the story
itself, which may mean something to my readers” (LeClair and
McCaffery 142-43). The author learns by experience, not by ideas,
where he or she is going, for “[t]he writer begins to understand only
in the process of writing. The more you write, the more you rewrite
[...], the better you stand a chance of understanding what you are
doing and who you are” (143). In Sukenick’s words, the novel has
“the obligation [...] to rescue experience from any system” and to
“seek to approximate the shape of experiencing”; “[i]f reality exists,
it does not do so a priori, but only to be put together. Thus one might
say reality is an activity, or process, of which literature is part”; it is
“a nexus of various kinds of energy, image and experience”(1985,
11, 241, 207). For Gass “we do what we can to destroy experience —
our own and others”, while “[w]orks of art [...] construct, they
comprise, our experience; they do not deny or destroy it; and they
shame us, we fall so short of the quality of their Being” (1970, 282-
83). Barth enunciates the necessity of articulating experience and the
problem that the articulation of experience incurs. In The End of the
Road, Jacob Horner notes:

To turn experience into speech —that is to classify, to categorize, to


conceptualize, to grammarize, to syntactify it —is always a betrayal of
experience, a falsification of it; but only so betrayed can it be dealt with at
all, and only in so dealing with it did I ever feel a man, alive and kicking
(119).
Postmodern Culture, Aesthetics, and the Arts 99

Experience in postmodern fiction is opposed to


understanding or, rather, rationalization and categorization, and it is
in fact non-communicable. Literary experience is meant to counter
the “denaturing of experience” caused by the denaturing of
“language, context, time and the human” in the twentieth century,
which leads to “incredulity [Barth says “skepticism”] toward
narrative as a form of representation” (Hayles, qtd. in Barth 1995,
308) —to what Barthelme calls “the burnt-out boxcars of a dead
aesthetic” (1985, 43) — and thus calls for new forms of narrative and
narrative experience. While in most modern texts, experience is the
beginning of a process that is supposed to lead to awareness, to
knowledge of the self and the world, even to some kind of mental
wholeness, and while the failure to attain such a goal produces
suffering and pain, despair and alienation, because awareness,
understanding, and knowledge are prerequisites of a sense of identity
and authenticity, postmodern fiction starts out from the perception
that experience and rationalization are not fully (or not at all)
compatible, that there is a hiatus between perception and reflection,
that the indissoluble mixture of perception, emotion, desire and
reflection that makes up experience cannot be abstracted, transferred
into a design, or taught as insight to others. This opposition between
the immediacy of experience and the removed activity of reflection,
between the fluidity of the former and the categorical approach of the
latter, takes the place of the problematics of identity as a central issue
of postmodern fiction. In a way, this antinomy between experience
and reflection, experience and articulation determines and explains
both the worldview and the form of the New fiction, i.e., the
radicalization of incongruity, the transformation of actuality into
possibility, and the multiplication of versions of the world, of the self
and of the story. All these strategies are conceived as strategies of
disorientation and re-making that are meant to render it more difficult
for the reader to abstract from and thus falsify the text, the
experience of the text, by imposing (humanistic) “meaning” on it and
making up some kind of unfounded synthesis. All postmodern
fictional strategies aim to force the recipient to remain on the level of
“experience”, to narrative fluidity, immediacy, and energy, to accept
gaps, breaks, and ruptures without logical “explanation”, to realize
the energy of desire and Life, and not to refer to the rules and norms
100 From Modernism to Postmodernism

of society and the categories of the mind. This entails employing the
categories of the mind in an open way, with full knowledge of the
unbridgeable gap between experience and reflection, and with
respect for the uncompassable and ineffable, the unrepresentable,
which can only be represented as presence in absence.
Experience is in fact so important for postmodern fiction that
it becomes a thematic idea. It is “dramatized” in three ways: by
setting it against reflection, by creating an opposition between
innocence and experience, and by placing the idea of experience
against the denial of (satisfying, orienting) experience. The subjects
of Gass’s Omensetter’s Luck are the fall from innocence to
experience and the destructive influence of reflection on the ability to
experience the world directly. Barthelme says in a story called “The
Balloon”: “The balloon resists definite meaning. However, it can be
experienced” (Ziegler and Bigsby 161). Barth, like Gass, thematizes
experience, especially in The Sot-Weed Factor. He makes the
dialectic of innocence and experience the paradigm on which the
whole book is composed — “the tragic view of innocence, the comic
view of experience” (1995, 265) — with experience winning and
innocence taking the place of a nostalgically revered ideal. Giles
Goat-Boy thematizes the process of experiencing initiation, erring
and maturing, arriving at the top and becoming Grand Tutor, and
experiencing finally the failure of the attempt to rationalize and
categorize experience — in spite of the fact that the regulating norms
of society call for a categorization of experience and thus for the
falsification of experience in the name of containment and control of
the non-structured and chaotic. A number of stories in Lost in the
Funhouse, for instance the title story, or “Night-Sea Journey”, or
“Menelaiad”, or two stories from Chimera, “Perseid” and
“Bellerophoniad”, build on this script of experience, experience
having the advantage, that it is not pre-structured in a form (other
than the quest), is spontaneous, does not infer a specific origin or
goal, and is all-inclusive, having a kind of new unity on a spon-
taneous, pre-rationalized level. Experience is something that one has
or that is denied, for whatever reason. Paranoia in Pynchon’s novels,
and obsession in Elkin’s fiction, for instance, are the result (or the
cause) of the withholding or the unattainability of useful, orienting,
or “genuine” experience. “Drifting” is a term that Pynchon employs,
for instance in The Crying of Lot 49, for the paradoxical state of
Postmodern Culture, Aesthetics, and the Arts 101

meeting the world without experiencing it “really”, as it “is”, which


means that the most direct way of confronting the world and the self,
“experience”, is dissolved into uncertainty. Barthelme’s texts often
appear strange because the material and the language used are
abstracted from and thus interrupt the familiar flow of ex-perience,
so that the fictional character as well as the reader appear to be
estranged from all commonsense contact with the world and to be
forced to reorient experience. The narrative strategies of postmodern
fiction indeed serve this goal of reorienting experience.
They create fantastic incongruities and align experience with
possibility, spontaneity and randomness, with a liberated sense of
exploration that is “self-ironic but serious” (Barth OwS 91).
Incongruity, plurality, and complexity form an adequate condition for
experiencing the flow of the world, the self, the story, and truth in
paradoxical terms, in a paradoxical relationship between dynamis
and stasis, motion and rest, expressed by Zeno’s famous Seventh
Paradox, as written by Barth:

If an arrow in flight can be said to traverse every point in its path from
bow to target, Zeno teases, and if at any moment it can be said to be at and
only at some one of those points, then it must be at rest for the moment it’s
there (otherwise it’s not “there”); therefore it’s at rest at every moment of
its flight, and its apparent motion is illusory. To the author’s way of
thinking, Zeno’s Seventh Paradox oddly anticipates not only motions
pictures [...] but also Werner Heisenberg’s celebrated Uncertainty
Principle, which maintains in effect that the more we know about a
particle’s position, the less we know about its momentum, and vice versa
(OwS 84-85).

The paradox inherent in the workings of space/time, position/motion,


rest/flight, or however one wants to call it, is the basic paradox of
experience, of the stories of our lives, of the lives in the stories and
the situations in fiction. At every moment everything is “frozen”, at
rest, but “all freeze frames are in motion —spacewise, timewise” (On
With the Story 89). The aesthetic matrix of postmodern fiction
represents, is in fact made up by, this paradox of experience; the
latter determines or rather includes both sequence and simultaneity,
disrupting sequence by simultaneity and simultaneity by sequence.
Yet Zeno’s Seventh paradox is only one side of the story.
There is another famous paradox that has a direct bearing on
postmodern fiction, in Barth’s words: “Zeno’s famous paradox of
102 From Modernism to Postmodernism

Achilles and the tortoise. Swift Achilles, Zeno teases, can never
catch the tortoise, for in whatever short time required for him to close
half the hundred yards between them, the sluggish animal will have
moved perhaps a few inches and in the very short time required to
halve that remaining distance, an inch or two more, et cetera —ad
infinitum, inasmuch as finite distances, however small, can be halved
forever”. Barth uses this paradox to illustrate the other antithesis of
postmodern fiction: to have to end the story but to be unable to end
it, “[b]ecause there are narrative possibilities still unforeclosed. If our
lives are stories, and if this story is three-fourths told, it is not yet
four-fifths told, if four-fifths not yet five-sixths, et cetera, et cetera —
and meanwhile, meanwhile it is as if all were still well”. Since our
lives are stories but our stories not our lives, and time “omits nothing,
ignores nothing, yet moves inexorably from hour to hour”, we have a
paradoxical combination of non-ending and ending: “The story will
never end. This story ends”. Barth builds the frame story of his
collection On With the Story on the fact that though “Achilles can
never reach the tortoise nor any tale its end, he does and theirs did,
amen”. The male protagonist of the story in fact dies of cancer,
without, however, causing any “end-stops in their love-story”. The
quintessence of all this is: “Tales unended, unmiddled, unbegun,
untold tales untold, unnumbered once-upons-a —” (26, 30, 256).
This is one way how situationalism becomes the ground
figure of postmodern fiction: there is always another situation to be
added to the foregoing situation, the story is serially composed,
allowing no synthesis at any point, because time is always going on.
And there is no point where one might say the story begins or
“middles” or ends. To “the postmodern spirit”, it is said, “less and
less does less seem more”. Barth’s idea of fiction is the (endlessly)
reconstructive view of the story, the “exhaustive but inexhaustible,
exhilarating novel” (1995, 87, 88). With the extension of the
aesthetic process into infinity coincides an extension of (the concept
of) time, which, as generations of philosophers —among them
Augustinus, Kant, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty — have noted, is
invariably bound to human perception. Barth, following the terms of
the Zeno’s seventh paradox, connects the concepts of story and time
to the perception of “[w]avehood”and “particlehood”, “momentum
and position”, story and life, life and death. Yet of particlehood and
wavehood the latter is central to Barth’s concept of life and story.
Postmodern Culture, Aesthetics, and the Arts 103

Story and dramatic action are like waves, feelings are waves (“Fact
is, a wave (no other way to put it) of trepidation-cum-near-nausea has
been building in him”). The question “Are we particles or waves?” is
exuberantly answered: “Waves, definitely: mere everchanging
configurations of memories and characteristics embodied in those
other waves, our minds and bodies [...] indeed, all human
relationships are waves [...] our [...] stories: waves, waves, waves,
propagated from mind to mind and heart to heart through the medium
of language via these particles called words” (On with the Story, 248,
249 124, 130, 143), words which guide “our experience of
experiencing experience”(Barth 1995, 56), and through which, in
Gass’s words, “we are seeing an act of seeing, not merely an object
[...] are in effect witnessing a perception [...] John Hawkes is the
American master of the sentence that sees” (1996, 40).
Deconstruction and reconstruction are partners in spirit and
action. But one can emphasize the deconstructive or the
reconstructive stance. The deconstructive view does not so much
point to wavehood as to particlehood, to randomness and chaos, the
end of logic and sequence. Sukenick writes: “situations come about
through a cloudburst of fragmented events that fall as they fall and
finally can be seen to have assumed some kind of pattern. The
sequential organizations of the old novel are coming to seem like an
extravagant, if comforting, artifice” (1975b, 38). With the latter
statement all postmodern writers would agree, but the consequences
drawn from it are different — different in the ways deconstruction
and reconstruction are accentuated and combined. Meta-fiction is an
attempt to have it both ways, to combine illusion with anti-illusion,
to establish the story, and to interrupt and fragment the story. (“So far
there’s been no real dialogue, very little sensory detail, and nothing
in the way of a theme. And a long time has gone by already without
anything happening” [Barth, the title story in LF 74]). This kind of
meta-fictional reflection, arguing from positions of traditional-
narrative synthesis, underlines the lack of such synthesis in the text;
it resigns the principle of integration to the narrated situation and the
serially or accumulatively arranged sequence of situations, to the
waves of perception, reflection, and storytelling, to the “narrative
possibilities still unforeclosed” that are not to be synthesized. All the
texts build the matrix of experience from the ideas of wavehood and
particlehood. Fiction finds its field of rivalry and context in the
104 From Modernism to Postmodernism

narrated situation and its guide in the aesthetic attitude. Postmodern


fiction, as we will argue later, is more philosophically minded than
any of its predecessors; its concordance with its time lies primarily in
its epistemological condition of uncertainty and its dissolution of the
concept of psychology and sociological unity and the current state of
society and culture. This makes it necessary to give some more
attention to what we have called situationalism in the various areas of
knowledge and the socio-cultural condition of our world.
3. Situationalism

3.1. Concepts of Culture, of Psychology, Sociology, and the


Visual Arts

As we have seen, the concepts and practices of postmodern


fiction share the stock of available ideas and their struggle for
dominance, the range of knowledge, and the analysis of the social
condition with philosophical theories and political and sociological
thought. It is a truism that each period has specific notions, concepts,
and strategies for coping with the world and the self. Foucault speaks
of a common ground or matrix of knowledge and understanding at a
specific time. One may call this a structure of knowledge, an
“episteme”, as the early Foucault did, or prefer a more flexible term
that emphasizes more the dynamics of the historical process. The
upshot in either case, however, is that there is a shared reservoir of
thought and world knowledge from which all draw. If one uses for
simplicity’s sake the term episteme and follows Foucault in assuming
that (1) the episteme of the 19th and early 20th century was the
persistent attempt at exploring the invisible deep structure beneath
the visible surface of things, at discovering the basic condition of
human existence, for instance through the behavioral sciences of
anthropology, psychology, sociology, but that (2) with the growing
complexity of the modern world a shift has occurred away from the
concept of the human personality as substance to its reduction to a
fragile subjectivity, the episteme of aesthetic modernism (Les mots
1969, 13), then one can go a step further and see (3) the episteme of
postmodernism in a loss of that subjectivity as measure of reality,
and its substitution, as Steiner has suggested, with a field of
experience that is more important than its experiencing subject and
constitutes the alterity of the object.
The dominance of the field of experience over the subject of
experience, the separation of this field into isolated situations, and
the abandonment of a “good” sequence of these situations, of bonds
of causality and logic, and of ideas of depth and essence, are the
reasons for using the term “situationalism” as the episteme of our
time. It is a term that accounts for discontinuity, incoherence, and
immanence, but also for the fact that language is localized, defined
106 From Modernism to Postmodernism

by “use”, by potentially innumerable, situationally grounded


“language games” (Wittgenstein), in Lyotard’s words, by the
“heterogeneity of language games” (1984c, xxv). Dismissing the
autonomy of the subject and the representational stance, Lyotard
notes that what he at first called “players” in language do not in fact
make their own use of the language games but as mere agents are “on
the contrary situated by phrases in the universes those phrases
present”, and that before “any intention” (1984b, 17).
Such situationalism, in culture, language, and literature, on
the level of combination turns into temporal seriality, i.e., follows the
principles of addition, accumulation, and repetition (without a given
order of cause and effect or of origin and aim). It mirrors the fact, in
Jameson’s words, that “our entire contemporary social system has
begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that
obliterates traditions” (1983, 119). Hassan, claiming that the “play of
indeterminacy and immanence is crucial to the episteme of
postmodernism”, coins a new word for this condition, “indeter-
manence” (1980a, 91). It points, under a different aspect, to the state
of affairs that we have called “situationalism”, which is characterized
by both immanence (of the situation) and indeterminacy (of
connections). The focus on the situation and a serialist composition
reflects both the deconstructionist idea of fracture and “a concept of
literature that is explosive” (Hassan 1980b, 56), explosive with
energy.
The decrease of unity is the result of historical developments,
first a separation of culture from the other spheres of life, and then
the multiplication of cultures. As already mentioned, Max Weber and
Jürgen Habermas, following Kant’s division of mental faculties, have
diagnosed the drifting apart of the three “cultural value spheres”.
The theoretical, the moral, and the aesthetic domains, by developing
their own logic, have become increasingly independent from one
another. Habermas argues that we are confronted with “three
different forms of argumentation: namely, empirical-theoretical
discourse, moral discourse, and aesthetic critique”, which form three
different “rationality complexes” (1987, 207). As Lyotard notes, the
“grand narratives of legitimization”, the “dialectic of the spirit, the
hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or
working subject” —in other words, the comprehensive universalist
and utopian intellectual projects, the narratives of enlightenment and
Situationalism 107

emancipation, and the teleological expectations of Western cultures


— are “delegitimized” in favor of heterogeneous and circumscribed
“little narratives” (1984c, 48-50). This decentering of discourses can
be evaluated quite differently — Habermas’s belief in reason and in
the necessity of continuing the modern project of enlightenment
differs notably from Lyotard’s and the other poststructuralists’
“dynamistic” cultural theories directed against the logocentric
positions and systemic thinking of Western civilization — but its
consequences cannot be denied. One consequence is that the division
of social spheres has given the “rationality complex” of culture a
greater weight in its own right, has in fact made it into a major
constitutive power. Another consequence is that ethical thought is
also situationalized. It can no longer depend on firm, determining
principles that guarantee the “right” decision, but has to make
decisions according to the specificity of situations, “since there are
no general rules that separate right from wrong” (Caputo 1993, 44).
Postmodernism rejects concepts of wholeness and unity; the
emerging “local” quality of culture is obviously shared by the
epistemological and ethical structures of the time. “Situationalism”
not only defines the culture at large but the behavioral sciences, too.
Psychology attains “a distinctly Postmodern mode of thought”, for
instance, in King’s interaction theory, in the abandonment of a self-
centered identity and in the loss of “boundaries between self and
other”. The English “[o]bject-relations theory decenters man so that
we are never alone, always in relation. We are born in relation to an
object” (Holland 300-305).16 Norman Holland notes that the “concept
of identity is itself High Modern, not Postmodern” and “that identity
only comes into being as someone perceives it”, that “[t]he most
personal, central thing I have, my identity, is not in me but in your
interaction with me or in a divided me [...] We are among”.
Accordingly, the individual is considered to be decentered, and
“[p]ostmodern psychoanalysis is the study of human individuality as
it exists between human skins. [...] Your identity is something I see
as a function of my identity, and my identity [...] of somebody else’s”
(303- 305). Then there is the notion that identity is a construct of
narrative, that the past can only be reconstructed as situations, and
that these situations are connected by a story, a constructed story, by
which we, so to speak, “externalize ourselves as if talking to
someone else and for the purpose of self-representation” (M. Currie
108 From Modernism to Postmodernism

1998, 17), in fact, postmodern writers would argue, that a person is a


multiple-story being and each story therefore fictional. Recent
psychological studies deny the existence of qualities of character
altogether. People are defined by the different situations they are in
and the way they perceive them in quite pragmatic terms, for instance
in terms of availability of time. Human beings behave differently
towards a morally challenging situation depending on whether they
have time to spare or not (Gilbert Hartman). Jacques Lacan
challenges the Descartes’s famous “cogito ergo sum” by writing: “I
am where I think not” (1988, 97). The true subjectivity is thus not
found in the conscious, connecting rationality but in the
undeterminable and unnamable fluid structure of the unconscious,
which for Lacan is similar to language. In language the relation
between signifier and signified is arbitrary; in fact “we are forced to
accept the notion of an incessant sliding of the signified under the
signifier”, (1988, 87), and the signifier defines itself in this monistic
view of language only in difference from other signifiers in an
endless chain of deferrals and disseminations of meaning.
In a combination of sociological and psychological
perspectives one can argue that postmodern habitats are “complex”
systems; they are “unmotivated” and free from constraints of
deterministic logic. The “existential modality” of the subjects or
“agents” is defined by “indetermination, inconclusiveness, motility
and rootlessness”, and their identities are “neither given nor
authoritatively confirmed” (Bauman 192-93). People move in a
circle. Being left alone, they experience a “privatization of fears” that
makes them look for “communal shelters”, for “imagined com-
munities” that are not based on specific goals and organizations but
define themselves alone through their [situation-oriented] activities
and therefore are subject to easy modification and change, depending
on how the “taste cultures” develop: “Having no other (and above all
no objectified, supra-individual) anchors except the affections of
their ‘members,’ imagined communities exist solely through their
manifestations: through occasional spectacular outbursts of together-
ness, marches, festivals, riots” (Bauman xix-xx). One of the results of
the proliferation of subcultures and imagined communities is that
surface as field of experience, in culture as in fiction, becomes
independent of the person who has culture. The eclectic and oppor-
tunistic, hedonistic and aestheticizing lifestyle of the decentered
Situationalism 109

postmodern subject provides only local knowledge and satisfaction.


The situation forms the lifestyle and the activities to the extent that
Malcolm Bradbury can say even of the writer: “The gift for creating
the fictional illusion of reality is shifted from the writer [...] to the
culture in which he practices” (1973, 19). Furthermore, the personal
(moral) choice and not the social system was formerly the decisive
factor.
With reference to sociology and other human sciences,
Goffman speaks of the “neglected situation” (1964), the analysis of
which, in sociology as well as in psychology, for a long time served
other scholarly goals. Parson, for instance, studied functional action,
i.e., a more synthesizing aspect of human life. The situation is
understood as the intersection between person and role, with
“subjective”, i.e., personal, and “objective”, system-oriented aspects,
with processive and static traits. In sociology, as in psychology, there
has been a slow process of abandoning abstract models of analysis
(role and status) in favor of the description of the surface structures
of the situation. The increased inclusion of the system-relativizing,
process-oriented components into the analysis of the situation occurs
via the intensified attention given to everydayness. For his part,
Goffman concentrates on the surface rules of the situation, which he
seeks to induce from empirical observations. This procedure leads
him to a reevaluation of subject and object: “[T]his self [...] is a
product of a scene that comes off, and is not a cause of it. The self,
then, as a performed character, is not an organic thing that has a
specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature,
and to die; it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is
presented” (1959, 252-253). “My perspective is situational” (1974,
8), he states in the introduction to his Frame Analysis, thereby
echoing W. I. Thomas, the founder of the situation concept. Together
with the situation concept, the notion of performance (of the
character) becomes important. Goffman sees the human being “as a
performer, a harried fabricator of impressions involved in the all-too-
human task of staging a performance” (1959, 252). Steven Seidman
calls for a postmodern sociology of “local narratives” that are meant
to “analyze a circumscribed social phenomenon in a densely
contextual way” that would define the phenomenon “spatially and
temporally” (70). By abandoning the status and system paradigms in
favor of the surface of the situation itself and the performance
110 From Modernism to Postmodernism

features of the subject’s behavior within the situation, a


decentralization is prepared which postmodern literature then
translates into narrative representation.
We may now finally turn to the chaos theorist N. Katherine
Hayles, who in her book Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in
Contemporary Literature and Science defines the root of postmodern
culture as: “the realization that what has always been thought of as
the essential, unvarying components of human experience are not
natural facts of life but social constructions”. The essential
components of life, including language, context, time, and the human
itself, have been “denatured” in four “waves” in the twentieth
century, in fact, “[t]he postmodern [culture] anticipates and implies
the posthuman”. Let it suffice here to refer to the denaturing of
context and time. According to Hayles, the human context has been
denatured by information theory and technology: “And once this
technology was in place, the disjunction between message and
context which began as a theoretical premise became a cultural
condition”. Her examples include Borges’s stories “Pierre Menard,
Author of the Quixote” and “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”. Along
with the context, continuity and coherence are denatured, a
circumstance which then shows in the denaturing of time (see also
the chapter on time below). She notes that the “cutting loose of time
from sequence, and consequently from human identity, constitutes
the third wave of postmodernism. Time still exists in cultural
postmodernism, but it no longer functions as a continuum along
which human action can be plotted”, which also leads to the
denaturing of action, one might add (see the last chapter). Focusing
on postmodern aesthetics, she cites Michel Serres’s observation that
the temporal aesthetics of the nineteenth century are replaced in the
twentieth century by “a spatial aesthetic focusing on deformation,
local turbulence, and continuous but nondifferentiable curves” (We
will come back to what has been called spatial form later in the
chapter on space).
It is especially interesting that John Barth in his Stuttgart
lectures on “Postmodernism, Chaos Theory, and the Romantic
Arabesque” makes Hayles one of his most important references,
quoting from her book extensively (in fact I have taken the above
quotes from his essay), because it throws light on the predispositions
and preconceptions of the postmodern authors in general, not only on
Situationalism 111

Barth. In this essay he states what is the raw material, the thought
basis of postmodern fiction, and what is not: “one does not write a
truly contemporary novel [...] merely by writing about contemporary
matters (as my distinguished countryman John Updike does so
eloquently — and pre-modernistically —in his “Rabbit” novels), any
more than one writes an arabesque merely by writing eloquently
about Arabs. One writes a contemporary novel by writing it in a
contemporary way”. The contemporary way is obviously to write
on the basis of contemporary paradigms of knowledge, which are
paradigms of uncertainty, of “a deeply ingrained ambivalence toward
totalizing structures”, “both resist[ing] and contribut[ing] to
globalizing structures” (Hayles). These models of thinking and
narrating are models of deconstruction and reconstruction, based on
an ambivalently situational structure in an undifferentiated flow of
time. To quote Hayles once more: “For them [who live
postmodernism] the denaturing of time means that they have no
history. To live postmodernism is to live as schizophrenics are said to
do, in a world of disconnected present moments that jostle one
another but never form a continuous (much less logical) progression”
(Barth 1995, 304-05). One need not share all the bleak outlooks
mentioned, and may indeed recognize, as the postmodern authors do,
the chances of the new and the potential that lies in the break-up of
wholeness for creative deconstruction and reconstruction, but the
direction is clear. After the deep structure of the situation has
dissolved, only the surface (non)structure is left, and Sypher’s
conclusion appears irrefutable: “If the significant is on the surface,
then the need for depth explanation has gone and the contingent [...]
is more authentic than the ultimate or absolute” (1968, 240) —
except, one would have to add, that there is the void.
To extend our view in this chapter one last time we will
include the visual arts into our argument. As is to be expected,
situationalism also defines the postmodern graphic and plastic arts, as
well as music. Painting and sculpture show the two crucial trends of
art that we already met in fiction, the overloading with form and the
cultivation of randomness as principles of composition. Both
strategies demonstrate the dominance of deconstructionist theory,
and are conducive to a situational and serialist construction without
“good” continuity, coherence, and immanent logic. Postmodernism
in painting and sculpture begins in America with some of the
112 From Modernism to Postmodernism

constructionist and decorative forms of abstract expressionism; it


continues with kinetic and Op art, Pop art, assemblages,
environments, and land art, Minimalism, Conceptualism,
documentary art, photo-realism, and others. Postmodernism gains its
full force with Pop art, which mediates between cultural levels,
reorients attitudes, and expands the concept of art. All the groups and
tendencies mentioned are international, more so than is literature
where immediacy of transfer is harder to achieve and language can
be a barrier to easy accessibility. Speed of communication, change,
and mobility are high in the visual arts because the market profits
from the new and the media provide for the immediate transportation
of all that is news. These artworks, irrespective of their style and
ideology, are completely divorced from traditional discrete
expressivity; they create isolated, often chance-dominated
combinations which “are just there”, refuse any clear hierarchic or
thematic organization, are actually in flight from interpretation, and
deny any ideology of meaning. Unhampered by pre-ordained notions
of structure and meaningfulness, they build up nothing but a pictorial
situation in the interrelation with the recipient, one either of
perceptual discontinuity or pure immanence of form, one at any rate
of radical openness to interpretation. They enforce a peculiarly
exclusive attention to the object and are overwhelming in impact
because they cannot be reduced to order and yet insist by their sheer
being there that to face them we do not need to make sense in any
symbolic way. The new strategies of subversion are playful. They
consider any surface or space as a potential “situation” that can be
circumscribed, filled, shaped, and estranged. In order to avoid
interpretation, they exclude the regimes of meaningful relations,
narrative and theme, that would call forth a continuous hermeneutic
activity, and include instead disorder with order, level tensions, and
reduce order to surface compositions, to decoration or design. By
creating on the picture plane or in the sculptural space, the
(disruptive) simultaneity of the incongruous and the discontinuity of
what is continuous or the self-contained design of abstract sculpture,
the designs of art establish the “other” and with it the defamiliarizing
dimension of strangeness and the fantastic.
This aesthetic program challenges anticipations, plays with
positions, with the viewer’s expectations and feelings, and it
radicalizes epistemological and ethical problems by the discordance
Situationalism 113

of the art language and its artifice. Yet the emerging gaps also
furnish in-between spaces, which, though they are no longer part of a
structural meaning, provide areas of association and contemplation.
Everything becomes possible within this explicit aesthetic of
discontinuity and incoherence, of anti-hierarchical, serial, random,
“imagistic” composition, of the primacy of immediate sense-
experience — of which Pop art in the late Fifties and early Sixties
was obviously the prime generator. Pop artist Andy Warhol
advocated a kind of artistic nihilism for stimulating creativity: “The
reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel
that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do” (117).
Another Pop artist, Roy Lichtenstein, summarizes his negative (anti-
modern) attitude by defining the goal of Pop art as “anti-
contemplative, anti-nuance, anti-getting-away-from-the-tyranny-of-
the-rectangle, anti-movement-and-light, anti-mystery, anti-paint-
quality, anti-Zen, and anti all these brilliant ideas of preceding
movements which everyone understands so thoroughly” (26). What
they argue against are integration, synthesis, organic wholeness.
Robert Rauschenberg, who helps to prepare the ground for Pop art
and whose paintings reflect “the sensory input of the city dweller and
the industrial output of goods and waste” (Alloway 1971, 202),
employs a paradoxical formulation, claiming that he aims at “an
extremely complex random order that cannot be described as
accidental” (“Random Order” l963, 26-27). Frank Stella, searching
for an “emotionally disengaged, formally rigorous and existentially
anonymous” (Butler 57) version of abstract painting, notes: “My
painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen is there. It
really is an object” (Frank Stella, in Battock 157-58). And Carl
André, a minimalist artist, aims at a “tough impassive anonymity” of
his work, expressing a “contempt for the sanctity of the art object”
(Waldman 201). A conceptual artist, Sol LeWitt, notes: “In
conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the
work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all
the planning and decisions are made beforehand and that the
execution is a perfunctory idea. The idea becomes a machine that
makes the art” (166).
The result of the anti-modern sensibility that is expressed in
these utterances is the reduction and transformation of technical
means, the dissolution of the traditional, modern concept of closure
114 From Modernism to Postmodernism

(and structure), and the exclusive reliance on the viewer’s “pure”,


situation-bound perceptions (and associations) in the reception
process. The issue initially was one of overcoming limits, with the
new movement taking on an increasingly subversive character. The
development passed from the aggressive provocation of Pop art to
the merely factual (but intentionally subversive) constitution of the
simultaneity of the “other”. Jackson Pollock had already abandoned
the concept of “center”, without which an autonomous construction
cannot exist, in the pure gestural expressions of his action paintings
or “over-all” pictures. The dimension of the other appears with
Rauschenberg on the canvas plane with the “found” or arranged
object. Relics of nature are placed both as contexts and as “material”
within the picture (as a stuffed goat’s head, as a “door”, or as a
photograph with traces of paint in Rauschenberg’s Combine
Paintings). Furthermore, the deconstruction of form is reflected in
the modifications of composition and format of the painting. The
picture plane is de-centralized (Newman), its frame broken up (Stella
in his “shaped canvasses”); holes and burns are put in the canvas
(Fontana). The picture plane loses its autonomy and integrity,
becomes an in-between, is, for example, explicitly related to the
wall(s), the floor, or free space by neon tubes or wire, with the
intention, in the words of Mario Merz, “to destroy the surface, to
make something other of the surface, which nevertheless remains
surface and light” (36). These examples demonstrate that all
traditional principles of organization, which used to constitute a
depth dimension, a psychological, sociological or, quite generally, a
thematic coherence between form and content, are abandoned,
actually quite openly and willfully rejected, in favor of the mere
surface coherence of the situation, which now needs the viewer’s
active participation to be established as artwork or anti-artwork.
The transformation of art is most extreme in the assemblages
and environments that often replace traditional sculpture. Montage
and superimpositions of pictures in video-sculptures and video-
environments “thematize” the problem of communication in the
contrast, the in-between, of art and TV (cf. the Fluxes artist Nam
June Paik). The “substrate” of painting, traditionally paper or canvas,
is replaced by aluminum, copper, or magnesium, and turns into a
three-dimensional sculpture on the wall (Stella), or gives way from
the outset to the object. The paradigms of organic life and
Situationalism 115

consciousness are replaced by those of material and construction.


The arrangements of opposites and their dynamic principle of
contradiction call up in what is perceptually connected the
disconnected and vice versa (art-life, plane-space, sculpture-object,
nature-culture). Assemblages and environments serve only sensory
perception, do not compose a whole, but, by the overriding presence
of matter, by using the contrast between material and (missing)
structure, are supposed to stimulate thought or do exactly the
contrary, make one forget about all thought, depending on the
specific ideology of art and the disposition of the viewer. The
breakdown of barriers and the tension-filled contradictions create
ruptures, gaps, a vacuum which do not depict the secrets of the
psyche but that which is raw, massive, powerful, and energetic —in
short the external world in all its inaccessibility —and in this way, by
rejecting the long-practiced tradition of giving out clear formal
signals of the artwork’s specific significance, art serves as analogue
to the inaccessibility of nature, as well as to the uncontrollable
character of civilization. In the freedom of “making”, art both
celebrates the creativity of the imagination and cries out against the
hubris of making, calls in fact for a new dialogue with the more
comprehensive systems of nature, magic, ritual, and other forms of
organization that would include randomness, chaos, and mystery.
And one further aspect of this kind of poststructuralist art is
noteworthy. In constructionist art, the place of inherent meaning has
shifted from the artwork to theory, which is the source or necessary
concomitant of art, in fact the prerequisite and context of
understanding its intention or non-intention. In the reception process
there is a gap and an antithesis between immediate response and
intellectual analysis; one has to react on two planes at once in order
to create and experience the work of art (and the fictional text) and
understand its underlying logic, which predetermines the production
process. In its extreme, constructionist art emancipates itself even
from the specific intention of the artist: it turns into contexts arising
from the demarcations created for “free” associations by the viewer.
This goes together with the minimalists’ attempt to “cleanse” art of
artistic expression and thus bar the thoughtless projection of the inner
into the outer and keep the artistically formed situation pure. Concept
art radicalizes the paradoxical in-betweenness of art by
conceptualizing the art arrangement as anti-art, often using “art”
116 From Modernism to Postmodernism

“conceptually” to pronounce the end of art through the


relinquishment of its creative means. With regard to his “Ten Black
Paintings”, Bob Law says: “The nature of my work can be viewed as
the last complete unit of picture making in western culture easel
painting, the extreme of abstract expressionism. So much so that one
is no longer looking at paint but one is forced to be aware of the idea
of a painting idea. At this point one has entered into conceptual art”.
Emphasizing mere randomness, the purely contingent,
unplanned, and insignificant character of art, Daniel Spoerri refers to
situationalism in the arts directly; he notes that “situations discovered
by chance in order or disorder are fixed (trapped) just as they are
upon their support of the moment (chair, table, box etc.), only the
orientation with respect to the spectator is altered. The result is
declared to be a work of art (attention —work of art)” (qtd. in Butler
102). As mentioned before, all these positions are closely connected
by the dominance of theory over the artwork. This dominance
relationship is different in fiction, a fact that bears witness to the
specific, divergent qualities each discipline of art has. Though
postmodern fiction is the most theory-conscious and philosophically
minded type of fiction in the history of literature, it is — in spite of
its natural alliance with aesthetic theory because of their common
linguistic medium [in contrast to music and the visual arts ] — the
most resistant to the dominance of theory. Narrative is a situational
transformation of meaning, as we shall argue later, and thus has to
reconstruct what it deconstructs in a sequence of situations, even if
this occurs in a series of isolated combinations, with the elements
juxtaposed in a serializing collage technique. This means that in
fiction theory is always subordinated to narrative. What connects the
various art forms in postmodernism is the importance of experience,
to which theory is subordinated in all disciplines.
As in fiction, the artistic situation in the visual arts not only
contains surface arrangements but can also achieve a depth
dimension. The in-between area that has been won for art by an
aesthetic of opposition marks not only a vacuum but offers new
possibilities, too. As already mentioned, in the emptiness of the in-
between, in the absence of absolute significance, a new “fullness”
with new significations can gather, both in the visual arts and in
literature. In the void, associations, allusions, connections, and
impulses accumulate and exert their effect on the viewer, who,
Situationalism 117

willingly or not, is forced to become an active participant in the


creation of the artwork. The full scope of this new fullness reaches
into cosmic space, into the infinite, the mythical (Beuys), and the
ineffable. In the visual arts, the reductions of minimal art prepared
the way for the employment of elementary stereometric forms like
the cube, the cylinder and the cone, as well as elementary, non-
domesticable and resistant materials. Rusty steel planks bar and
define familiar urban spaces (Serra), massive granite stones are piled
up to form quasi-archaic walls (Rückriem). A dialogue is opened
with the pre-formed, decorative, and harmless cultural environment,
and also with domesticated nature, in which recalcitrant objects are
placed as alien elements, as forms of the “other” (Judd, LeWitt,
Long, Merz, Serra). Christo, the “packaging” artist, uses fabric to
draw a fence through the California landscape, to span a valley, or to
alienate a building. The immense dimensions of the earth and the
universe are “measured” in land art sculptures. Walter de Maria with
his steel rods draws the elementary force of lightning/light into his
“lightning field” in New Mexico and thus creates in-between heaven
and earth a cosmic light-space environment in which the contrast of
nature and art evokes the “mythical other”. The only way art can
any longer hope to communicate meaning in de Maria’s work lies in
the openness of the situation, its endeavor to show the dimension of
being, as Heidegger would have it, in its infinite absence, in the
language of art, which (in an extension of Heidegger’s concept of
language) may be called the “house of being” (see 1971). The spaces
in-between, left by the process of de-traditionalization and de-
spiritualization, are challenged for their own creative potential. In
them the buried possibilities of experience and conception, the primal
symbols, the elementary pictorial motifs, and the archetypical forms
of the aboriginal past and their connotations find their place and offer
additional sources of inspiration (or mere association) —as in the
“primitive” igloo sculptures of glass and other materials by Mario
Merz, which use the common associations of Inuit (Eskimo) life to
represent our nomadic existence. This state of the arts appears to be
worldwide.
To complete the picture we may finally point to postmodern
music, which has the same situational and serial quality as the visual
arts. Michael Nyman says of conceptual music that there is “a
situation in which sounds may occur, a process of generating action
118 From Modernism to Postmodernism

(sounding or otherwise), and a field delineated by certain


compositional rules” (3). John Cage notes: “living takes place each
instant and that instant is always changing. The wisest thing is to
open one’s ears immediately and hear a sound suddenly before one’s
thinking has a chance to turn it into something logical, abstract or
symbolical” (qtd. in Nyman 1). And finally we might listen to Karl-
Heinz Stockhausen: “The work is composed in ‘moment form.’ Each
moment, whether a state or a process, is individual and self-
regulated, and able to sustain an independent existence. [...] rather
the concentration on the Now —on ever Now —as if it were a
vertical slice dominating over any horizontal conception of time and
reaching into timelessness, which I call eternity: an eternity which
does not begin at the end of time, but is attainable at every moment”
(Karl- Heinz Stockhausen, qtd. in Butler 84).

3.2. The Framework of the Narrated Situation

In the case of literature, two conditioning circumstances


should be kept in mind. First, the narrated situation is a narrative
constant; it is foundational to fiction.17 Consciousness and its product,
fiction, are always anchored in situations which are isolated by
division and negation and (re)connected by the “good” continuity of
time, by reflection and imagination. Fiction has a location (Iser 1993,
167), or rather is a location, an actual site. It is so much dependent on
being located that the narrated situation is not only the basic unit of
the narrative location and of communication with the reader, but also
one can even speak of narrative as the situational transformation of
(anti)meaning. Second, the advent of what we call situationalism,
i.e., the restriction or even abandonment of thematic and
psychological codes in favor of the “autonomy” of the situation, is a
deformation. Whatever deconstructs the patterns of continuity,
coherence, and meaning acts as an elementary narrative force that
deforms form. This requires some further clarification.
The concept of situation denotes, as all aesthetic terms
should, an open structure, not a fixed content. It indicates a
structurability that remains constant and at the same time allows for
innumerable transformations. It is a model in the sense of “a design
that something else is patterned after” (Goffman 1974, 41), and not a
given reality. The narrated situation is more than an image. Sartre
Situationalism 119

maintains — in Iser’s words — that “images cannot be synthesized


into a sequence, but one must continually abandon an image the
moment one is forced by circumstances to produce a new one”
(1978, 186). Though this is true of the image because it is defined by
its sensory content, it is not so for the situation since it has the
character of a prescribed form and is established by its non-
effaceable constitutive elements, space, time, character, action/event.
From the situation emerge all synthesizing narrative strategies like
character, plot or theme. “Situation” is the most neutral,
comprehensive, and flexible term for the basic unit of fiction, in
which fiction takes on its pragmatic gestalt. The situation molds the
shape of each version of the world by the actuality of its data. In fact,
“fiction cannot be about anything nonactual” (Goodman 1984, 125),18
i.e., non-situational. In the mobile syntagmatic system of the text, the
actual given situation changes into another actual, formerly only
possible, situation, which then gives up its actuality in favor of
another situation, etc.
The “linguistic turn” in narrative and narratology, the claim
that narrative, or rather the language of narrative, could refer to
nothing but itself because the linguistic sign points only to other
signs and does not have the ability to represent an outer world to
which it has no access, of course overstates the case of language in
the face of all common sense. But the premise that the idea of
linguistic reference is an illusion, does not lessen the importance of
the notion of situation and content in the analysis of narrative, for the
situational orientation of narration is not to be seen from the
perspective of a mimetologically oriented theory and does not follow
mimetic thought. The deconstruction of the referentiality of language
and sign by poststructuralists like Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, or
Barthes19 renders the concept of language absolute, but it does not
deny its iconic, image- and situation-building faculty. This also holds
true where the text itself, as in the case of the fantastic, is based on a
different kind of logic and acquires an “irrealistic” quality (Barth).
Whatever the opaqueness or fragmentation of language, its creative
iconic energy causes the reader to conjure up — even if only in
shifting fragments or collage-like combinations — framing images
and situations. To be sure, the deconstructionists and writers like
Gass and Federman pronounce language as the limit beyond which
we cannot reach and make characters into “word-beings” (LeClair
120 From Modernism to Postmodernism

and McCaffery 142) or “just one more linguistic source of energy —


where the language comes from and where it is going” (Gass, in
Ziegler and Bigsby 156). But that does not exclude the situational
quality of linguistic energy. Federman, for instance, answers the
question: “How does a book typically begin for you?” in terms of
language: “All my books literally come to me in the form of a
sentence, an original sentence which contains the entire book”. But
these sentences are not just linguistic constructions; they in fact
constitute, in spite of their if-form, situations with their illusions of
time and space: “The Twofold Vibration began with the sentence: ‘If
the night passes quietly tomorrow he will have reached the twenty-
first century and be on his way ...’ [...] The first sentence that came to
me and became Double and Nothing was: ‘If the room cost eight
dollars a week then it will have to be noodles’” (LeClair and
McCaffery 128). The sentence Federman begins his book with is not
only a “visual image”, it constitutes a situation. And the situation
creates the illusion of a world. He notes: “Naturally you can’t ever
truly destroy illusions; as soon as you start reading you rebuild the
world through my words and create a new system of illusions”
(LeClair and McCaffery 128).
In contrast to starting the book with language, with the first
sentence, there is another strategy: to begin with the story. This is
central for another group of writers, for instance Barth and Coover.
They make the narrated situation and its visual images the ground
phenomena of their writing. As Coover says in an interview: “The
central thing for me is story. [...] I know there’s a way of looking at
fiction as being made up of words, and that therefore what you do
with words becomes the central concern. But I’m much more
interested in the way that fiction, for all its weaknesses, reflects
something else — gesture, connections, paradox, story” (LeClair and
McCaffery 69). All postmodern writers would agree to what Gass
has to say — “What you want to do is to create a work that can be
read non-referentially” (LeClair and McCaffery 164) — but such a
work would still be read situationally.
The situation in fiction is double-poled: it is form as order
and force as disorder (the term force will be defined below). This
indissoluble duality gives it its operational power. Considered as
form, the constituents of the situation are space and time; character
and action/event. They form minimal consistencies without which no
Situationalism 121

experience and no representation of experience are possible, and they


ensure the coexistence of mobilization and immobilization. Being an
abstraction, and a design, the situation pertains as matrix both to
experiential reality and the worlds of memory and imagination, i.e.,
art. In a formal model of the situation that focuses on its basic
properties, the four elements make up an abstract correlation of
prerequisites and conditions, the general components of a structure;
as structure they form a totality, are transformable and regulate
themselves (Piaget 1971, 44). The components of the situation are
defined in relation to one another and constitute — in various
combinations — interrelations of causality, correspondence,
interaction or conditioning, or, under the impact of force, stimulate
the energetics of the situation, disrupt these interrelations, which
they, however, cannot but create. Space, time, character, action/event
are “schematized” (Ingarden) by selection, combination, substitution,
and context-building (Jakobson); they are “filled”, foreshortened,
transformed or even deleted; yet they still are indissoluble and
guarantee, by their own “good” continuation, the continuation of the
textual world from one situation to the next. They can be broken up
but remain present even ex negativo as the horizon of the situational
construct and its sequence, shaped by the changing focus of
narration.
The situation as form acts like a frame. The frame theory, in
this case Goffman’s concept of frame, helps to understand the
constitution and deformation of the narrated situation, its centerment
and decenterment. In his book, Frame Analysis, Goffman speaks of
“two broad classes of primary frameworks: natural and social” (22).
The natural primary framework would in our terms encompass the
elementary components, space and time, and the more complex ones,
character and action/event: “Natural frameworks identify occurrences
seen as undirected, unoriented, unanimated, unguided, ‘purely
physical.’ Such unguided events are ones understood to be due
totally, from start to finish, to ‘natural’ determinants” (22). “Social
frameworks”, on the other hand, “provide background understanding
for events that incorporate the will, aim and controlling effort of an
intelligence, a live agency” (22). However, the central assumption
(pointing to the necessity of an integrated situational context) is that
“although natural events occur without intelligent intervention,
intelligent doings cannot be accomplished effectively without
122 From Modernism to Postmodernism

entrance into the natural order” (23). The situation as force can
change this relationship of dominance. Although the more complex,
social framework (character, action), relies on the natural framework
(space, time), which is the more elementary one, the force factor may
deform this relationship. What is called the social frame might be
reduced to the natural frame; in other words, it might become
undirected, unoriented, unguided, or mechanized, and the natural
frame might take on some of the characteristics of the social frame
like will, and the controlling effort of the intelligence. Dismissal of
the formally operative hierarchies in the interplay between form and
force would level out whatever differences there are among the
elements. As a result, the situation would be decentered or rather
“deformed” in that the expected dominance relationships between
social and natural worlds and with them the reign of elements like
character and plot and of concepts like reality, truth, and identity
would be suspended.
The viewpoint of the recipient is also situational. He or she
perceives not only a composition of linguistic signs, but also a world,
a world as form. As Gurwitsch says in his Field of Consciousness,
“the perception of the words arouses and supports specific acts of
meaning-apprehension. However, the perceived words belong in no
way to the meaning apprehended through those acts” (263). Since
“the codes of fiction are tied to our perceptual system as well as to
our language” (Scholes and Hernadi 239), the pleasures of reading
are not just pleasures of language and form, but actually originate
from, in Bakhtin’s words, “those aspects in the life of the word [...]
that exceed [...] the boundaries of linguistics” (181). The reader’s
interaction with the text creates a world in a “narrative
communication situation” (Rimmon-Kenan 86), in what Wolfgang
Iser calls a “situational frame”. This frame is meant to “reduce the
indeterminacies” of the world by giving them form (1978, 66).20 The
reader does not only react passively to the narrated situations, he
activates his own situational- form potential. While the world
projection in the text creates a more or less informative scaffolding
of situations, the reader responds to this information with his own
scripts, frames, and schemata of world knowledge. A script is a
“description of how a sequence of events is expected to unfold [...] A
script is similar to a frame in that it [the script] represents a set of
expectations”. Frames differ from scripts in that frames are used to
Situationalism 123

represent a point in time. Scripts represent a sequence of events that


take place in a time sequence. Schema, a term used in psychology
and referring to memory patterns that humans use to interpret current
experiences, is “a synonym for framelike structures” (Mercadal 255,
254). The “experiential repertoire” thus contains both static
(schematic, framelike) and dynamic (scriptlike) types of expectations
(Herman 1049).21 The stories presented stand in a mutual relationship
with the pre-fabricated knowledge and disposition of the recipient
who is used to perceiving, inferring, and reflecting from pre-stored
groupings of causally and chronologically ordered occurrences. The
more the backdrops of belief and expectation, the scripts, frames and
schemata of the reader’s repertoire of experience, and world
knowledge are deconstructed by the actual composition of the current
narrative situation, the more the unusual, the remarkable and the
complex come to the fore. They complicate the reconciliation
between the expected and the emergent situation, as well as the
organization of situations into sequentially and causally, in short,
meaningfully organized wholes. The recipient’s repertoire of links
and analogies then proves to be an outmoded framework. It becomes
necessary to rethink the problem of the interface of script and story,
of the general and basic processing mechanism, and the cognitive
resources. A failure to evaluate the sequence of situations in terms of
coherence and consistency leads to an appropriation of only the
minimal constituents of the situation and the interruption of contact
with antecedent and consequent. The difficulty, even impossibility of
grasping a logical succession compels the recipients to process the
text within situationalist limits, or rather forces them to establish
their own pattern of (irrealist, non-causal) connections. That is what
happens in much of postmodern fiction.
The concept of situation is defined not only by form but also
by force. Form contains and encloses force, while force dispossesses
form, frame, and fixities by becoming transience and energy. Art as
force has been discussed by Heidegger, Vattimo, Serres, Derrida,
Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Brooks, and others, who more or less
draw on Nietzsche’s “critique of the highest values hitherto” and his
“principles of a new evaluation”. In The Will to Power. Nietzsche
sets the “desire for becoming” (432) against “being”, force against
form, asserting that it is essential “to start from the body and employ
it as a guide” (289), that the condition of art is “an explosive
124 From Modernism to Postmodernism

condition” (421), which transports energy and plenitude and


“superabundance” (434), causes a “necessary overflowing of all
limits” (422), and “appears in man like a force of nature” (420). But,
as Heidegger — reproachfully — remarks, force is for Nietzsche not
a “sheer upsurgence of the Dionysian upon which one might ride”
but it in fact becomes form as the expression of the victory of force.
Form is “the enclosing limit or boundary, what brings and stations a
being into that which it is”; it is that which contains force. Force so
to speak self-masters itself in form. “[T]he created thing [force] is to
be restrained, overcome and surpassed” (1991, 88, 129). Vattimo in
turn criticizes Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche and lays stress on the
fact that Nietzsche emphasized the “dionysiac residuum, a form of
liberty of the spirit”, and its liberation from rationalism and
metaphysics, and that he later in fact discovered that form was force
too, that the “alleged ‘values’ and metaphysical structures are just a
play of forces [...] rather than orders corresponding to ‘values’”
(1993, 88, 93-94), and that art thus is “a pulsive mechanism with a
destructuring effect”; it “breaks up the subject’s established
hierarchies” (99-100). Form is thus “forever being exploded by a
play of forces, of particular forces, namely the body’s instincts,
sensuality and animal vitality” (105).
We do not need to follow this argument in more detail. What
is important is that force and form, mobility and stasis, have to be
taken together, that their opposition and interface, namely the
working of form as exaltation of force, and force as a “destructuring”
and restructuring of form, create a paradox that defines the narrated
situation as well as the interaction of situations and the organization
of the whole text. Nietzsche writes of the “[f]ascination of the
opposing point of view”, the “refusal to be deprived of the stimulus
of the enigmatic” (Nietzsche, Will to Power 1968, 262).22 In his essay
“Force and Signification”, Derrida states:

Our intention here is not, through the simple motions of balancing,


equilibration or overturning, to oppose duration to space, quality to
quantity, force to form, the depth of meaning or value to the surface of
figures. Quite to the contrary. To counter this simple alternative, to counter
the simple choice of one of the terms or one of the series against the other,
we maintain that it is necessary to seek new concepts and new models, an
economy escaping this system of metaphysical oppositions. This economy
would not be an energetics of pure, shapeless force. The differences
Situationalism 125

examined simultaneously would be differences of site and differences of


force (1978, 19-20).23

In turn, Peter Brooks, writing about “the dynamic aspect of


narrative”, psychologizes force, makes the situation a field of
energetics, the “field of force”, which bundles the “textual energies”,
and differentiates “that which was previously undifferentiated” (xiii,
47, 101, 12).
In fiction, force is embedded in the “energetic materiality” of
the situation and generates the latter’s qualitative transformation that
“overspills form” by the “materiality in movement” (Deleuze and
Guattari 1993, 114, 408). It alerts us to incompletion and mobility, to
the discharge of desire for movement and the other, to the dialectic
relation between determination and becoming. As force, the situation
produces an incongruence of items, a disorder of fragments, which
Foucault calls “heterotopia”, a “disorder in which fragments of a
large number of possible orders glitter separately in the dimension,
without law or geometry, of the heteroclite; [...] in such a state,
things are ‘laid,’ ‘placed,’ ‘arranged’ in sites so very different from
one another that it is impossible to find a place of residence for them,
to define a common locus beneath them all” (1970, xvii-xviii).
Strengthened are the “inessential”, non-structurable and non-
teleological, the actual density and opacity of the thing seen, the non-
order of contingency, and chance. The heterogeneous lines of force
create alterity, continuous change, disrupt and transcend the stasis of
segmentarity by a new “nomadism” (Deleuze), a polyphony of
thought, so that the “perpetual living present” of the situation
surpasses invariant structures and well-determined schemes of
signification. This perpetually living present manifests the “natural
tendency of the book” to disclose itself “only in successive
fragments” (Derrida 1978, 20-21).
It is obvious that postmodern fiction privileges the force
factor of narration, the energetics of the situational field, to which
also belong the multiplicity and exchangeability of perspective. The
situational field underlines the significance of sensory experience and
of desire, the importance of a multiplicity of viewpoints, and the
decomposition of continuation, i.e., the weakening of the
transsituational, synthesizing influence of character, plot, and theme.
As Hawkes says, “[m]y fiction is almost totally visual, and the
language depends almost totally on image”, and this visual quality of
126 From Modernism to Postmodernism

language “depend[s] on my feeling for dreams and on my interest in


exploiting the richness and energy of the unconscious”, and on “the
dreamlike conflicts out of which I try to make narrative fiction”
(Bellamy 1974, 103, 104). In a similar vein Sukenick writes: “Start
with immediate situation. One scene after another, disparate, opaque,
absolutely concrete. Later, a fable, a gloss, begins to develop,
abstractions appear” (DN 154); John Barth notes the fact that “it is
also important to ‘keep the senses operating,’” for “the reader’s
imagination is oriented to the scene, perhaps unconsciously” (LF 70).
Elkin speaks of his characters’ obsessions: “what we read about now
— and what I write about — are people whose wills have been
colored by some perfectly irrational desire. In the case of Boswell, it
is the will to live forever. In the case of Dick Gibson, it is the will to
live the great life that is the trite life. In the case of the ‘The
Bailbondsman,’ it is to know the answers to questions that no one
can know. In the case of Ashenden in ‘The Making of Ashenden,’ it
is the desire to find an absolutely pure human being — someone as
pure as himself [...] Their obsessions drive them” (LeClair and
McCaffery 117-118). What Cage has said of Rauschenberg’s Inferno
drawings, that their subject is “a situation involving multiplicity”, is
also the ground phenomenon of postmodern fiction (qtd. in Alloway
1975, 132), except that in narrative one situation turns into another.
The fact that the situation is isolated, deformed, and
decentered, that the time sequences, and the intersequential relations
lack order and meaning, is seen to be, as already mentioned, a
reflection of the state of affairs in the lifeworld and of course call
forth mixed reactions. William Gass comments in Fiction and the
Figures of Life: “Our world [...] lacks significance; it lacks
connection” (57). In his novel The Tunnel, Kohler speaks of the
“composure of decomposition. Bits and pieces. That’s the picture”
(373). In Pynchon’s terms, this world is full of “strange
inconsistencies” (MD 632). In Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five,
Billy is “spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next
[...] never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in
next” (20). Elkin notes the whimsicality of life and art and says, “I do
regard my ‘art’ as totally arbitrary” (Ziegler and Bigsby 103). Robert
Coover writes in his first novel, The Origin of the Brunists, which
might be cited as his poetological statement: “Games are what kept
Miller going [...] Miller perceived existence as a loose concatenation
Situationalism 127

of separate and ultimately inconsequential instants”. In Coover’s The


Public Burning it is said that “[t]here are sequences but no causes,
continuities but no connections” (236-37). Hawkes, for his part, says
in an early interview: “I began to write fiction on the assumption that
the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme”
(Dembo and Pondrom 11); and when asked in another interview
about “a consciously held theoretical position”, he added: “fiction
“should be an act of rebellion against all the constraints of the
conventional pedestrian mentality around us. Surely it should destroy
conventional morality” (Bellamy 1974, 108). Federman opts for
liberation by fragmentation: “the elements of the new fictitious
discourse (words, phrases, sequences, scenes, spaces, etc.) must
become digressive from one another — digressive from the element
that precedes and the element that follows. In fact, these elements
will now occur simultaneously and offer multiple possibilities of
rearrangement in the process of reading” (1975, 11). The postmodern
writers accept or even celebrate chaos as force in life and fiction, a
trend that we will document in detail at another point of our
argument. Hawkes, for instance, says of his works that “in each there
is a sense of closure and then a sudden suggestion of expansion
towards nothingness that will once again or soon again be filled with
chaos” (Ziegler and Bigsby 175). Chiding the postmodernists for
their lack of moral concern, the traditionalist John Gardner says that
“chaos gets overadvertised” (LeClair and McCaffery 30).
Gaddis’s early novel from the fifties, The Recognitions,
marks the transition between modernism and postmodernism. What
Federman, like Sukenick, Hawkes, and others, celebrates as new
freedom, the artist-figure Stanley in The Recognitions complains
about quite in the spirit of modernism. While their statements mark
the difference between modernism and postmodernism, Stanley
criticizes the loss of the modernist totalizing position, which,
however, as this novel and Pynchon’s fictions attest to, need not be
given up in the New Fiction, may even be welcome as an additional
perspective, though it is pushed into the background or appears as a
“minus function” (Lotman). According to Stanley:

That’s what it is, a disease, you can’t live like we do without catching it.
Because we get time given to us in fragments, that’s the only way we
know it. Finally we can’t even conceive of a continuum of time. Every
fragment exists by itself, and that’s why we live among palimpsests,
128 From Modernism to Postmodernism

because finally all the work should fit into one whole, and it’s impossible
now, it’s impossible, because of the breakage, there are pieces everywhere
(Rec 657).

The narrator in The Recognitions remarks that


“consciousness, it seemed, was a succession of separate particles,
being carried along on the surface of the deep and steady
unconscious flow of life, of time itself” (58); “every fragment of
reality intrudes on its own terms, separately clattering in and the
mind tries to grasp each one as it passes, sensing that these things
could be understood one by one and unrelated” (431); the streets are
filled with “people for whom time was not continuum of disease but
relentless repetition of consciousness and unconsciousness, unrelated
as day and night or black and white, evil and good, in independent
alternation, like the life and death of insects” (78). In spite of these
complaints and the thematizing of the identity problems of the
protagonist, The Recognitions mirrors the indicted state of affairs and
follows the style of postmodern fragmentation: it demonstrates the
fragmentation of situations and, as in the following example, the
disconnection of situations by using a diagrammatic style:

Fruit stores were busy. Taxi drivers were busy. Trains were crowded, in
both directions. Accident wards were inundated. Psychoanalysts received
quivering visits from old clients. Newspaper reporters dug up and wrote at
compassionate length of gas-filled rooms, Christmas tree fires and blood
shed under mistletoe, puppydogs hung in stockings and cats hung in
telephone wires, in what where called human interest stories (112).

Force first of all is the negation of the fixed, the unmovable


form. With the emphasis on force the paradigms of fiction change the
structure that orders the narrative argument, that judges, confirms,
and negates values. Doubt enters the situation. One can perceive this
stage of development in a historical context that shows an increasing
deconstruction of the paradigms of order. Historically, American
literature appears to apply three (interrelated) paradigms of form and
order: (1) a system of universal dualisms, building upon the
elementary opposition of good and evil, nature and civilization,
knowledge and non-knowledge, identity and nonidentity; (2) the
national contrast between the American Dream and the American
reality, between the humanistic ideals of freedom, equality and
happiness for all and the failure to realize them in the New World;
Situationalism 129

and (3) the difference between appearance and reality, which is the
paradigm of the European realist novel in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, and which is directed towards the analysis of
the relationship between the individual and society, and the
investigation of moral standards and moral hypocrisy. This reality-
appearance paradigm attained a stronger presence in America since
Howells and the appearance of the realistic/naturalistic American
novel (though Melville already indicted moral hypocrisy but with
reference mostly to the American dream or universal aspects of
human behavior). The combination of the three paradigms in the
modern American novel has been the basis of its strength
(Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby,
Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, etc.).
The paradigm of postmodern fiction is “disappearance”.24 It
questions the hierarchies, fixities and definites that form the basis of
ideals, of dualisms, and of universal “truth”, as well as of the logical,
the “real” and the probable, which are also constitutive perspectives
of narrative, that focus the situation and its elements, space, time,
character and action/event (plot). In Federman’s words: “Like a
painter wanting to erase the scene or the portrait, we wanted to erase
the words, the story, the people, from our writing” (LeClair and
McCaffery 150). Sukenick notes, “the world is changing, there are
new circumstances that demand new paradigms [...] The effort at
control is hopeless”. Answering the question as to what a new
model might be, Sukenick emphasizes “participation”, meaning
participation in the flow of life and the text (LeClair and McCaffery
287). The new circumstances Sukenick speaks of, Baudrillard sees in
the fact that the social sphere has disappeared, that “there is no
longer even any social referent of the classical kind (a people, a class,
a proletariat, objective conditions)” (1983a, 19). What remains are
mere simulations of social reality (see the discussion of Baudrillard’s
positions above). Accordingly, “[p]ostmodernity [...] is a game with
the vestiges of what has been destroyed. This is why we are ‘post’ —
history has stopped, one is in a kind of post-history which is without
meaning” (1984, 25).
Though one may stop short of Baudrillard’s one-
dimensional, exaggeratedly bleak view of post-history,25 one must
admit that important aspects of the social world have disappeared,
not only in the lifeworld but in postmodern fiction, too. The
130 From Modernism to Postmodernism

disappearance paradigm has been effective in decomposing systems


of order and narrative form in fiction on various levels. It has
manifested itself (1) in the disappearance of thematic structure,
which is based directly upon relevant epistemological and ethical
notions about the human being and the world, and reveals itself not
in a character, a social context or a plot alone, but in the meaningful
synthesis of the narrated world as a whole. The new paradigm shows
itself also (2) in the disappearance of social formations, i.e., of the
social level of character and action, which not only contribute to the
overall thematic structure, but also have a status and function of their
own. They offer in the syntagmatic development a potential of
sympathetic and moral identification as well as of distancing
judgments. Finally, the disappearance mode brings about also (3)
the decomposition of the centered structure of the narrated situation,
and a randomization of its elements, space, time, character, and
action/event. The result of this extreme postmodern development is
that narrated and narrating situation become “plastic and mani-
pulable”, and “heterogeneous, ambiguous, pluralized” (Gibson 12).26

3.3. Form as Self-Reflexivity, Narrative Pattern, Collage,


Rhythm, Theme, and Perspective

Force deconstructs form, and yet force also creates form. As


mentioned, Nietzsche came to understand that force deconstructs
form but then masters itself as form and that, conversely, forms are
the manifestations of force. The opposition of form and force is
pronounced but also diffused in postmodern fiction. The activities of
force decompose form, and they are contained in form. This occurs
in a number of ways. First, as argued above, though the situation is
perpetually in construction, it is always a site and as such has an
actual form. It is an outline of changing axes, but always within the
scheme of the constitutive situational elements, space, time,
character, action/event, which almost automatically build up a
network of relations that are interpretable. The framework of
constitutive elements and relations forms the determinate site for the
interplay of, and struggle between, often mutually exclusive
positions, the co-presence of differentiation and dedifferentiation,
diversity, and sameness, the energetic combinations of an infinite
variety of possibilities, open to “any imaginable kind of
Situationalism 131

confabulation without constraint”, establishing “abstract collections


of states of affairs” (Pavel 2, 50). Second, no narrative representation
of a situation is without evaluation, and evaluation is form. The
situation interprets the given, attributes the modalities of freedom,
necessity, and chance to what happens, in fact holds together, in spite
of the pressure on its compositional form, heterogeneous drives
without their ceasing to be heterogeneous (by the “intrinsic
connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships [...] artistically
exposed” [Bakhtin 291-92]). Furthermore, non-totalizing, subversive
perspectives like play, irony, parody, and the comic mode come to
mediate between opposites and break up barriers between “inside”
and “outside” in the attempt to create the attitude of an as-well-as
instead of the modernist either-or. “The serious novel” is for
Federman “the playful novel” (LeClair and McCaffery 140), a
position with which practically all his colleagues would agree. The
result is a multi-form that replaces the hierarchy of forms and
surpasses the doublet content and form. As Gass says, “For me any
piece is a play of various forms against one another. When I am
playing with forms, it is often simply to find a form for something
odd like the garbage” (LeClair and McCaffery 166).
With and beyond these general formative influences and
strategies, the postmodern writers develop their own notions and
practices of form, through which, more than through anything else,
they come into their artistic individuality. Yet all these forms have a
common feature in that they are reductions of totalizing forms. These
new forms and the concepts behind them become distinct when one
sets them against a full, totalizing model of pure form, in which form
(almost) eliminates force, for instance in modernist symbolic
constellations. What the negentropic postmodern narrative strategies
of storytelling strive to overcome is illustrated by the entropic
counter-model that Vonnegut provides in the science fiction part of
his novel Slaughterhouse-Five. The narrative form cultivated by the
inhabitants of the extraterrestrial planet Tralfamadore eliminates
time, separation, and temporal sequence, and the dynamics of life in
general, factors which would individualize the situation and would
open it to the varieties of feelings and thoughts, to desire and strife,
joy and pain, anxiety and assurance. Sequentiality is replaced in
Tralfamadore with simultaneity and synchronicity. All situations of
past, present, and future, emptied of redundancies and focused on the
132 From Modernism to Postmodernism

essentials of being, are seen simultaneously, thus forming a whole


that is, however, an uncentered whole. It is accepted, indeed never
questioned, in its status or function by “why-questions”. It sounds in
some passages like a parody of an exaggerated, totalizing, modernist
form, the so-called “spatial” form, in which everything is
interconnected with everything else and directed towards the depth
view, be it centered in the essence of world or in the essential
subjectivity of the self:

each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message — describing a situation,


a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other.
There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except
that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once,
they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep.
There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no
causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many
marvelous moments seen all at one time (76).

Simultaneity is an important value in postmodern fiction, but it is a


simultaneity combined with, and challenged by, the dynamics of
change that thwarts closure. Federman remarks: “My books grow
from the inside, not necessarily growing from left to right, in one
direction, but also from right to left, up and down and sideways [...]
[M]y books never look like finished products” (LeClair and
McCaffery 130). The Tralfamadorian novel demonstrates a concept
that is illusionary, not even acceptable for humans; it excludes half of
the human destiny, the dynamics of energy and force, of tension and
struggle.
Postmodern fiction answers the requirement of form in two
ways. On a meta-level of self-reflexivity, art self-interrogates its
status as art and its forms. Or as a narrative mode, it establishes
designs and patterns that order (even in disorder) the flow of
narrative in the text. Self-reflexivity of course needs to combine with
narrative, as Barth does. Coover argues for self-reflexivity: “If
storytelling is central to the human experience, stories about
storytelling, or stories which talk about themselves as stories,
become central, too. For a while anyway” (LeClair and McCaffery
68). The reason for self-reflexivity, for the reflection on narrative
patterns and strategies without and within the text, may be, again in
Coover’s words, “the human need for pattern, and language’s
propensity, willy-nilly, for supplying it” (LeClair and McCaffery 68);
Situationalism 133

Coover confirms the relevance of this kind of aesthetic self-


reflexivity, together with the moral value of narrative, by arguing that
narrative is an anthropological constant and requires not only
practice but also theoretical reflection on its rules: “Who’s to say [...]
that self-reflexive fiction, dealing as it assumes it does with a basic
human activity, is not, by examining that activity as it celebrates it,
engaged in a very moral act?” (68) The accusation that self-reflexive
fiction is narcissistic Sukenick counters by placing self-reflexivity in
the all-important context of play and consciousness: “narcissism is
good. [...] It teaches people how to play with themselves”, and “self-
reflexivity is a path — maybe the only path — to great
consciousness” (LeClair and McCaffery 289). Federman makes an
important distinction even though it is doubtful that his prophecy has
come true: “For a while we had something like self-consciousness,
and now we have more of a self-consciousness. The two terms are
not yet separated, but they have achieved a different kind of balance,
so that we are going to have much more consciousness, much more
reflexiveness (in the sense of thinking), much more awareness in the
novel, with a lesser emphasis on the self” (LeClair and McCaffery
141).
It appears that, for many postmodern writers, narrative only
reveals its wisdom when one breaks it down by reflection or
distortion. Only by deforming and transforming narrative can be
released “its energy, suggestiveness, its possibilities” (Sukenick).
Form here emerges out of a conceptual control that includes the lack
of control (or dies-control or anti-control), that opens the possibility
of play, of play with tension and fusion, with simultaneity and
sequentiality without final synthesis. Several of the postmodern
writers, however, dispense with self-reflexivity or meta-fiction. For
instance, though he tried to develop a taste for it in Snow White,
Barthelme does not have “any great enthusiasm for fiction-about-
fiction” or meta-fiction and thinks that terms like “surfiction” and
“superfiction” are “terrible” (LeClair and McCaffery 38). And Elkin
notes: “The Barth who takes himself seriously as a metafictionist is a
Barth who bores finally [...] later Barth really is Barth for Barth’s
sake” (LeClair and McCaffery 110). Barth, too, points to the danger
of boredom, though he does not take himself too seriously as a
metafictionist, at least not in attitude. Preferring “the aesthetic
pleasure of complexity, of complication” (Bellamy 1974, 7), which is
134 From Modernism to Postmodernism

his trade-mark, he pleads for a third code, or rather for third and
fourth codes, in addition to the double-take of self-reflexivity: “I
myself like a kind of fiction that, if it’s going to be self-conscious, is
at least comic about its own self-consciousness. Otherwise, self-
consciousness can be a bloody bore. What is more loathsome than
the self-loathing of a self one loathes ?” (Bellamy 1974, 11). We
have then (1) the narrative, (2) the self-conscious reflection on the
narrative, (3) the playful attitude necessary to combine the two, and
(4) for distance and entertainment purposes, the comic mode.
Sukenick adds a further dimension, for, as he points out, “‘reflection’
goes two ways — there’s the pun on reflection as careful thought [...]
part of the reflection is the work reflecting itself”. Reflection can
become a mirroring effect of the narrative, as in Long Talking Bad
Conditions Blues, where “part of the reflection is the work reflecting
itself: the book has two parts, with a blank in the middle, which is
like a mirror in that on either side the parts reflect one another, repeat
one another” (LeClair and McCaffery 290-91).
When pattern is the issue, it is contrasted to but also
interfused with debris, cliché, waste, and chaos. As Mason says to
himself in Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, “Stars and Mud ever
conjugate, a Paradox to consider” (724). According to Gass, “[t]he
text is both a path through time and a pile of debris” (LeClair and
McCaffery 171). Hawkes argues for pattern or design and debris. He
aims at “a formalizing of our deepest urgencies”; and this explains
why he negates theme, character, and plot as surface coherences, yet
reasserts the necessity of “structure”, i.e., the necessity of the
conscious act of art to give the drives of the unconscious “a
significant shape”,27 or “parallelism” because “the unconscious
coheres totally” (Ziegler and Bigsby 172). And this significant shape
is the fusion of “design and debris”, to use the programmatic
formulation from Travesty. Hawkes sees his work in terms of
“conscious control and conscious manipulation”, “as a continuum of
recurrent images, obsessive thematic concerns, repeated form”; and
he asserts that his obsessive thematic concern “after The Lime Twig
has been the imagination itself”, which, however, has a double,
destructive/reconstructive function, for “annihilation is the term of
the imagination”. Thus “the creative power and the destructive
power” combine (Ziegler and Bigsby 174, 177, 179, 180). In Elkin’s
view, life is shapeless, but art, “as everybody knows, is shaped”. He
Situationalism 135

notes: “I am concerned with structure and form and my novels are


structured and formed” (LeClair and McCaffery 112-113). The basis
of their structure and form is the “physics of obsession” (113). But
then it is paradoxically the cliché that contains form, “the real truth”.
What The Dick Gibson Show is about is “that the great life was the
life of cliché” (116). “That’s what it’s all about, to find the truth
hiding in clichés” (Ziegler and Bigsby 108). Though triteness is
transcended by form, “the kernel of organization is still trite. It’s still
triteness itself” (108).
Yet the positions vary widely when it comes to particulars.
For Gass, to whom “[s]tyle seems [...] to be the ultimately important
thing about a writer”, clichés, “are indeed the enemy; they are
anybody’s; they are thoughtless counters; they don’t reflect the
particular” (Ziegler and Bigsby 159, 158). Sukenick by no means
wants “to indulge people’s fantasies [...] I don’t want to present
people with illusions, and I don’t want to let them off cheaply by
releasing their [clichéd] fantasies in an easy way”. And he claims
that “fiction should tell the truth” (Bellamy 1974, 71, 69). So here we
go back to truth, but truth now comprises contrasting, even mutually
exclusive, in spite of their similarity, different things: design and
debris, Stars and Mud, verity and cliché, style and content. Again we
recognize the paradox as ground figuration, now of the truth and of
its form, structure or pattern. The debate about the form of Form
continues with the other writers.
Coover opts for structure, because it can be manipulated:
“though structure is not profoundly meaningful in itself, I love to use
it. This has been the case ever since the earliest things I wrote when I
made an arbitrary commitment to design. The reason is not that I
have some notion of an underlying ideal order which fiction imitates,
but a delight with the rich ironic possibilities that the use of structure
affords. [...] The Henry book [The Universal Baseball Association]
came into being when I found a simple structural key to the metaphor
of a man throwing dice for a baseball game he has made up” (Gado
148-49). The similarity to Barth’s ideas Coover himself recognizes.
Barth says that he wants to transform the clichés of traditional fiction
by being “passionately formal” (LeClair and McCaffery 17). He is
“of the temper that chooses to ‘rebel along traditional lines’” (71),
also the traditional lines of form; he speaks, as French authors also
do, of the “used-upness of certain forms or the felt exhaustion of
136 From Modernism to Postmodernism

certain possibilities” (64) of the novel, but still wants to keep all
possibilities of “story” and “discourse” open for further experiments
with double-coding. He writes The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-
Boy as “novels which imitate the form of the Novel, by an author
who imitates the role of Author” (72). The result is for him “to try to
abstract the patterns [...] to follow the patterns” and by following it
“to parody the patterns” (Bellamy 1974, 13), so that it can become an
operational matrix for his own narrative. Barth, however, has the
feeling that form and force cannot be balanced by metafictional
strategies or the play with patterns and form alone, but need to
involve content, in fact desire and emotion. He notes: “I have at
times gone farther than I want to go in the direction of a fiction that
foregrounds language and form, displacing the ordinary notion of
content, of ‘aboutness.’ But beginning with the Chimera novellas —
written after the Lost in the Funhouse series, where that
foregrounding reaches its peak or its nadir, depending on one’s
aesthetic — “I have wanted my stories to be about things: about the
passions, which Aristotle tells us are the true subject of literature. I’m
with Aristotle on that” (LeClair and McCaffery 17).
Barthelme’s specific answer to the question of form in
fiction is collage. Asked to elaborate on his statement that “[t]he
principle of collage is the central principle of all art in the twentieth
century”, he says: “I was probably wrong, or too general”, but then
explains: “The point of collage is that unlike things are stuck together
to make, in the best case, a new reality. This new reality, in the best
case, may be or imply a comment on the other reality from which it
came, and may be also much else. It’s an itself, if it’s successful”
(Bellamy 1974, 51-52). What the collage of unlike things represents
in terms of form is the non-orderability of the world. It is anti-form
that, however, ex negativo is form, or rather, the “minus function”
(Lotman) of form or indeed a new form. Gass writes: “Let nothing be
lost. Waste not even waste. Thus collage is the blessed method: never
cut when you can paste. No question it works. It works wonders,
because in collage logical levels rise and fall like waves” (1979,
282). The underlying psychic state that allots significance to collage
as form is what Barthelme calls “anxiety”, which is the fear of and
confrontation with disconnection: “Maybe I should have said that
anxiety is the central principle of all art in the etc., etc?” (Bellamy
1974, 52) Federman uses the terms collage and montage for
Situationalism 137

describing his own ordering principles: “What you finally read in the
published text is what’s been collaged and montaged” (LeClair and
McCaffery 132). Sukenick says that he makes use of constructive
“geometrical patterns” or “arithmetical patterns” in Up and Out
(LeClair and McCaffery 290), and goes on to say that “you simply
impose a form on your materials, it not really mattering how this
form was generated” (291), and that “a truly nontraditional form
would probably be an arbitrary form” (292) (to which Elkin would
agree). This “idiosyncratic form” that “releases my imagination”
(292) has much to do with collage and “play”.
Rhythm is another term that is important. Barthelme, Gass,
Federman, and Sukenick “pay a great deal of attention to rhythm”
(Bellamy 1974, 52, 34; LeClair and McCaffery 129, 291), which, as
an ordering principle, is a calculated combination of repetition and
variation, and “imitates” life as form. Gass revives the concept of
beauty in a somewhat Kantian sense (“I am a Kantian”) to indicate
symmetry, balance and order. “Old romantic that I am, I would like
to add objects to the world worthy of love. [...] My particular aim is
that it be loved because it is so beautiful in itself, something that
exists simply to be experienced. So the beauty has to come first”
(LeClair and McCaffery 23). It has to come first because it avoids
and transcends generalizations and clichés, for “[b]eauty always
brings things back to itself” (Ziegler and Bigsby 161), and also,
because, by means of the “aesthetic mode”, it transfers beliefs and
“the various systems” of philosophy into form, not because they are
truths, but because of their “great magnificence” as “work[s] of great
art” (166-67). Hawkes employs the words “beauty” and “beautiful”
for the expression of form and design, but he is thinking of a design
that would “liberate the kind of energy” and would “uncover the
kinds of material that seem desperately and beautifully essential to us
as readers”, that would “reveal the essential beauty of the ugly”
(Bellamy 1974, 104-105). Gass’s quite conscious emphasis on the
particular and his choice of the term beautiful suggest (just as
Hawkes’s phrasings do) the symbolic method, which he — just as
many of his colleagues, Hawkes, Barth, Brautigan, Pynchon, Elkin,
etc. — makes use of for purposes of form and significance. And one
must again add play, irony, parody, which as evaluative perspectives
form the built-up rhythms, designs, patterns, collages, etc. To quote
Sukenick again: “Language play releases the possibility of meaning
138 From Modernism to Postmodernism

that is inherent in language, that is built up in it through tradition.


The wisdom of language only reveals itself, oddly, when you break it
down” (LeClair and McCaffery 283).
Of course, force and form have to interface to establish new
form. As already mentioned, the new basic, structuring form is the
specific postmodern form of the (double-coded) paradox, which we
will later use to illustrate postmodern aesthetic practice in a nutshell.
Here it may suffice to demonstrate how form and force separate and
interact in the actual and the possible, and in the transformation of
theme. In the actual, form and force meet. While the actual enacts a
world in the form of a given situation and limits the reign of the
possible, of force, it at the same time affirms the plenum of (other)
possibilities, because in the actual (in contrast to the “real”) there are
no a priori boundaries separating it from the possible. This is the
reason why the postmodern writers react so strongly against the
terms “real” and “reality”; they exclude the movement of force in
favor of one form, while the actual includes mobility as the possible,
which is the signum of energy and the aim of desire. The actual
presupposes and points to the possible, and the possible enforces its
entry into the actual. In its double coding, “[f]iction operates in
actual worlds in much the same way as nonfiction”; it “takes and
unmakes and remakes and retakes familiar worlds, recasting them in
remarkable and sometimes recondite, but eventually recognizable —
i.e. re-cognizable — ways” (Goodman 1978, 104-5). “The actual
world [in fiction] is produced from [the] plenum of possibilia,
selected by input and intention”. Conversely, “[p]ossibility is
implicate existence. Actuality depends on a process of unfolding
enfolded order to explicate existence” (Globus 136). In narrative,
actuality unfolds out of and turns into possibility in the sequence and
change of concrete situations. Actuality replaces reality in fiction;
reality can appear only as the idea of the real.
Between actuality and possibility is the pause. The process
of isolating and joining situations establishes and fills the “blank-
ness” (Goodman). However, the latter, even in a virtual state,
remains potent as silence, as an alternative to the world-making
through pragmatic gestalts. Barth says: “We remember Beckett: ‘that
silence out of which the universe is made.’ Plot and perhaps over-
ingeniousness are a shore against that silence” (LeClair and
McCaffery 15). And Hawkes speaks of “the power of unlimited
Situationalism 139

possibility and the nothingness that is the context of all creativity”


(Ziegler and Bigsby 178), which he notes is held in balance by art.
Nothingness, or, in compositional terms, the “pause” or “blank”, are
special forms of difference within the situation and between
situations; they serve to incorporate the unknown within the known,
the inexpressible within the expressible, the possible within the
actual, and thus serve force, the energetics of narrative. Situated in
the pause and the blankness between the situations is the potential of
both difference and synthesis. Difference produces force, synthesis
form. Narrative defines its world-making not as intrinsic gestalt but
as difference and struggle, as what Goodman calls “differentialism”
(1984, 15). But again, difference is ambivalent as narrative is.
Difference “as an empty space operates both as a divider and as a
stimulus for the linking of what has been divided” (Iser 1993, 229).
The colliding of the two impulses transfers the doubling structure of
the situation (form-force) into the pause between the situations,
which elicits the double process of separating and linking situational
entities, of concealing and revealing connections and contextual
references.
The most encompassing form of linking situations is theme.
The text in its temporal extension establishes transsituational form in
terms of continuities, coherences, and contexts that take on the
function of theme. The end of thematics, which is the widest-
reaching synthesis of form is not feasible, and neither is the end of
the constituents of the narrated situation. Yet force as part of form
transforms the binarism of thematic conceptualization. Postmodern
themes have little to do with the integrating role that traditional and
modern “essentializing” themes play. The quest for identity is no
longer the thematic deep or super structure28 that controls the
selection and combination process of narrative, and it no longer
steers the meaning-building procedure in the syntagmatic sequence
of the narrated situations.29 Theme in postmodern experimental
fiction is no longer thinkable as “an imaginary, intentional or lived
domain beyond all textual instances” (Derrida 1988a, 251), because
it would “stabilize [the] undecidable” in “the mode of pro et contra”
(1979b, 63). Force in the postmodern novel negates the static,
taxonomic theme expressed in a challenge of opposites, of totalizing
dialectics, and a centered concept of structure. Refuting the
rationalizing, generalizing, and codifying constraints that obstruct the
140 From Modernism to Postmodernism

principle of incertitude and the free-floating temporal process, John


Hawkes, for instance, claims: “I would never begin a fiction with
‘big themes’ in mind” (Bellamy 1974, 107).
But even under these deconstructive circumstances, form as
theme is not inactive; it restructures its own repertoire. It
demonstrates that the crisis of meaning in narrative also provides the
means for managing and instrumentalizing that crisis. While in
postmodern fiction the human faculties are confronted with their own
limitations and open up beyond their limits vast areas of the
unknown and the inaccessible, what is thematized are no longer
issues like identity and wholeness, but “différance”, a “movement
that consists in deferring [meaning] by means of delay, delegation,
reprieve, referral, detour, postponement, reserving”, a movement
“which differentiates” (Derrida 1981, 8-9). This mode of
differentiation does not summarize, neither in terms of character and
plot, nor in those of a codifying, bipolar theme. “Themes” are now
the disruptive energetics of the text, the abstract forces of irreality
and possibility, discontinuity and indeterminacy, fluidity and (the fear
of) entropy as such, as “truths”, which are manifested and
concretized in the sequence of situations, their decenterment, the
deferral of meaning which nowhere comes to rest, to closure. Gass
remarks “that the writer is concerned with the exhibition of objects,
thoughts, feelings, and actions where they are free from the puzzling
disorders of the real and the need to come to conclusions about them”
(Bellamy 1974, 33). But this accentuation of force by avoiding the
“puzzling disorders of the real” and “conclusions about them” would
be, in Nietzsche’s terms, just a self-mastering of force as (abstract)
form. The problem is the concretization of this kind of theme, of the
content, the story, and the character.
There is obviously no way to thematize these “abstract”
forces without their concretization via character. Character is split
into the “idea” of character (in the mind of the recipient) and its
manifestation in the text; it reflects not only “roundness” but also
reduction. It activates the paradigms of disappearance versus
appearance and absence versus presence. The central paradox is that
while the character upon which the theme used to focus is decentered
in postmodern narrative, the relation of subject to object is still the
crucial concern of the text. The result is that the very disintegration
of the character becomes thematic. The character decomposes,
Situationalism 141

disintegrates temporally into movement, i.e., the fluidity of being,


and “spatially” into the coexistence and rivalry of mental capacities.
Sukenick writes, “[m]aybe there aren’t real characters. That’s an
important thing. Maybe people are much more fluid and amorphous
than the realistic novel would have us believe [...] that modes of
character are breaking down”, so that people become just a “focus of
consciousness”, that their “sense of themselves shifts according to
situations that they find themselves in”, which would “allow wider
possibilities to arise in yourself” so that “you can be an infinite
number of beings” (Bellamy 1974, 62-65). Sukenick (like many of
his colleagues), in fact, reverses the traditional dominance
relationships between character and situation. He writes: “I don’t
really believe in characterization in the old sense. [...] In my fiction
there is a heavier sense of the way situation can influence
characterization in contemporary life [...] I also think the interior
environment of the personality has become more fluid, more subject
to immediate incident and circumstance than was true in the
Victorian personality as portrayed in traditional fiction” (In Form
1985, 132-33). The unification of mental capacities is endlessly
deferred, as is the unity of character. Rorty, in an earlier article
defines the subject not as a “moral self, the embodiment of
rationality, not as one of Rawls’s original choosers [...] but as a
network of beliefs, desires, and emotions with nothing behind it —
no substrate behind the attributes. For purposes of moral and political
deliberation and conversation, a person just is that network” (1983,
585-86).
In fact, perception, reflection, emotion, desire, and action are
thematized in their own roles, for the most part independent of the
unity of character. They can mediate between force and form because
they are processes, not results, and do not serve, or participate in, a
static “system” of power and values, and they still contain meaning,
meaning in a fluid, indeterminate, intermediate state that
encompasses the possible in the actual, the unknown in the known.
They structure the field of experience or, rather, they are made to
deconstruct the static and ideological fields of what is called
“reality”, of belief and truth, and are themselves problematized in
their functioning and their interrelation with one another, of course
always with reference to a subject, which cannot be dispensed with,
even if only a “voice” appears to speak and act the text. The potential
142 From Modernism to Postmodernism

or non-potential that each mental approach has for making


“meaning” flexible, for participating in the creation of values and
building a meaningful attitude towards a world that includes the
ineffable becomes an important thematic issue and shapes the
situations of the narrative. This means that the character does not
react to the world in full consciousness, with all his or her mental
capacities. The relationship between character and world, subject and
object, in Vattimo’s words, is never rendered in “fully unfolded
luminosity” but in a “faint light”. Art is now a “weak ontology”,
and truth in art is “stripped of the authoritarian traits of metaphysical
evidence” (1988, 75, 85, 76). The decenterment of character leads to
a decenterment of the narrated situation, which loses its focal point.
This effect finally induces narrative to represent the story, the
character, and the plot only in their unrepresentability, as that which
cannot be grasped as unity and “reality”. Coover says that “[t]he
trouble is, it’s usually a story that can never be told — there’s always
this distance between the sign and the signified. [...] The important
thing is to accept this unbridgeable distance and carry on with the
crazy bridge-building just the same” (LeClair and McCaffery 72).
When the synthesizing instance of the theme is not the
logical, causal, syntagmatic organization of character and plot but the
field of experience, and within the field of experience the situation
and the sequence of situations, then the theme reflects these
circumstances by crystallizing in a ground-situation, which in
postmodern fiction is the underlying basic situation of both
fragmentation and fusion. It seems to fulfill itself in negation. Yet
there is a paradoxical turn-about. In terms of deconstruction, the
theme seems to resign itself to the limits of representation and
cognition, but deconstruction is bound up with reconstruction, and
the process of reconstruction turns around and — in contrast to
modernism — presents its own thematic anti-theme, the
positivization of the negative, the paradoxical ability of the
imagination to shift the balance. This creativity does not emerge
from the cognitive, rational, and emotional control of world and self
but from the pause, or the blank; the result is the widening of the
world beyond rationalization and control. The imagination and its
themes of course are not placed in a vacuum; they have their frame
of reference, which could be the essence of human existence and the
self, or the relationship between the individual and society. As
Situationalism 143

mentioned, none of this could work in postmodern fiction under the


paradigm of disappearance vs. appearance. In the case of postmodern
writers, the themes of fluidity, multiplicity, and the ineffable find
their focus, so it seems, in the energetics of life. Life’s paradoxical
fusion of being and becoming, of connection and separation, contrast
and reversal, is the model for the fusion of form and force, even
though in the individual case this link might not be mentioned. This
preeminence of life as model for the texts not only affects the
narrative strategies but, in the case of Elkin, also reverses the modern
trend of defining character and theme primarily by existential depth
and intensity of consciousness and awareness, and leads to a new
appreciation of the “small satisfactions of life”. The result is the
paradoxical situation that, in his words, “[t]he theme of the novel
[The Dick Gibson Show] is that the exceptional life — the only great
life — is the trite life. It is something that I believe” (LeClair and
McCaffery 117).
The representation of multiplicity and multi-valence as form,
however, needs a variability of perspectives, perspective being the
ultimate form because it evaluates the material and gives the theme
its direction, its judgmental potency. The perspective again brings in
the human stance as corrective to the viewpoint of universal, trans-
human life. The decenterment of character and the decomposition of
the situation are, as it were, “rectified” by simultaneity and
exchangeability of perspectives that form the master code of the
author. Their arrangement is human work, the creative work of the
imagination, and therefore restabilizes the human perspective and
reintroduces control. Play and (self-)irony, the parodic and the comic
modes rule, loosen up and make flexible the presentation of the
material; they “positivize” negativity (Warning) and prevent a
shifting of the text towards chaos, but they also preclude its
schematization under any single term, even such as disappearance or
multiplicity, and the reign of a fixed ideological position, a
circumstance that allows even the revival of character and plot,
though in translated form. Play, irony, parody, and the comic mode
extend the possibilities, including the possibilities of form; they
provide the aesthetic distance that is necessary for the interface of
form and force. These open modes in fact become thematic. They
blend the representational (form) and non-representational (force),
the ordered (form) and the chaotic (force); they also fuse the mimetic
144 From Modernism to Postmodernism

(form) and the anti-mimetic (force), which in fact cannot be


separated, as Heidegger noted. According to him, non-
representational thought is balanced by its counter-pole,
representation, and the latter cannot be eliminated by “a shift of
attitude, since all attitudes, including the ways in which they shift,
remain committed to the precincts of representational thinking”
(1971, 87). Though the mimetic, of course, does not “adequately”
represent reality or ground, which remain illegible, and though it
consists only “of that simulation that Aristotle called mimesis”
(Genette 1988, 18), it might be “time for postmodernity [and the
criticism of postmodern narrative] to consider mimesis and anti-
mimesis together, as intertwined parts of a puzzle that we shall
possibly never solve” (Gibson 103), which arises out of the
combination of form and force. In postmodern fiction, the
perspective, not “truth”, reigns; the new truth is the truth of the
variability of perspectives. The variability of perspectives and of
truth, however, paradoxically, rests on one truth, the impossibility of
filling or covering the void and the irreversibility of death. The
ultimate theme then is representation not of world and self but of this
paradoxical constellation of disorder and order, uncontrollability and
control, in a continuous stream of irresolvable situations.

3.4. Situation, Symbol, and Meaning

The use of the symbol in postmodern fiction may here


demonstrate how the various modalities of form, pattern and self-
reflexivity, collage, rhythm, theme, and perspective in various
combinations work together to create, play with, ironize, and parody
forms of meaning. The reason for activating the symbolic mode of
significance in postmodern fiction is the same as it was for romantic,
“realistic”, and modern fiction: to fill gaps of knowledge that cannot
be filled by rational explanation, with the difference, however, that
now the gaps have widened to include the void (a crucial word in
postmodern fiction), and that the ambivalent suggestions of symbolic
meaning have increased in uncertainty to a point where meaning
includes chaos and pure nonsense and where not the inherent
meaning but the willful perspective reigns absolute. Just as the
reconstruction of theme after its deconstruction demonstrates its
irreplaceability as organizational matrix, so the reconstruction of the
Situationalism 145

symbol reveals the lack of substitutes. It gives force form and allows
for uncertainty of both form and force. In its modification, the
symbol is exemplary of the way postmodern narrative signifies.30 The
fact that it deconstructs and yet reconstructs the most important
indirect signifying mode of modernist fiction, the symbolic
signification, demonstrates that there is continuity in discontinuity.
The literary symbol is a unit of interpretative significance. It
is a concrete part of, and embedded in, a narrated situation, which
comprises the whole situation or a sequence of situations. It is based
on the relations that emerge from the sensory surface-representation;
it participates in the perspectival portrayal of the situation and is a
mode of valuation. Or, to use linguistic terms, words assume the
character of signifiers of a material world, and, their signifieds,
corporeal entities, provide access, on another level, in a secondary
interpretation, to a synthesizing meaning. In other words, the
signifier of a literal signified (for instance a picture, a house, or a
landscape) can also be a secondary signifier which refers to another
(symbolic) referent, incorporated in the signified fictional thing,31 and
thereby implants in the concrete thing a judgmental, generalizing
significance, which can be either more open and forceful, or more
closed and form-oriented. Form in the symbol correlates with that
which it is to control or fails to control — force.
The versatility of the literary symbol makes possible its use
as a meaning-given device in quite different context. In a Romantic
text of the nineteenth century, it tends to point from a part to the
whole, to a depth dimension, the essence of nature or the world; in
“realistic” fiction it mostly refers “horizontally”, in terms of
contiguity, to a neighboring context (house mirrors the history of a
family); in modern texts, it increasingly takes on a central formal and
thematic role, the function of integrating the various aspects of the
narrative, of “bundling” the components of its significance (Henry
James, The Golden Bowl), and thus of serving the so-called “irony of
form” — i.e., of mirroring the ambiguities of meaning and the
manifoldness of perspectives in a “totalizing” form. It is obvious that
from Romanticism to aesthetic Modernism the “natural”, obvious
kind of referentiality of the symbol decreases, while the
constructionist factor, the formal and thematic function, and the
ambiguity of meaning increase to a point where the symbol stands
for the ineffable (as it already does in Melville’s Moby-Dick). The
146 From Modernism to Postmodernism

postmodern text heightens both the constructionist factor and the


openness of the symbol, as we will see, and, as mentioned, subjects it
to the play of perspectives. All this is possible because the literary
symbol, like the narrated situation on which it builds its interpretative
function, is a complex formal model of signification with quite
variable elements. As such a model of meaning it has a number of
basic properties: an abstract correlation of prerequisites and
conditions, the general components of a structure, defined in relation
to one another and in various combinations, constituting
interrelations of causality, correspondence, interaction or
conditioning. There are three basic components of the literary
symbol: (1) The basis of the symbol is the narrated concrete entity,
the vehicle. Not only is the kind of object presented significant for
the function of the symbol but also the way of its representation,
either as a detailed image or only a shortened and skeletted diagram.
It is evident that the more detailed the image-situation presents itself,
the more complex and open can be its meaning, while the
diagrammatic representation is more explicit and tends more towards
closure. (2) The semantic tenor or meaning of the symbol can be
more definite or more indefinite, though in fiction it generally retains
at least a residual mystery because of the length of the text and the
manifoldness and complexity of relations. The tenor may be
innovative (and private) or conventional, or both. The manifestation
of the symbolic significance may be more self-evident or more
dependent on the context; the referential scope of the tenor may be
wide or narrow. In all cases, the author and the reader have to depend
on a functioning relationship between the (inherited, acquired) code
and the rendered information for the decoding of symbolic meaning.
(3) The specific relation between vehicle and tenor determines the
way the symbol signifies, for instance in terms of causality or
analogy. This aspect of the symbolic structure is versatile and
difficult to define. It can be more rational and direct, though not
exclusively so, can be what traditionally has been called
“allegorical”, in Goethe’s words, “searching the concrete for the
general”, “where the specific serves only as example, an
exemplification of the general”. The vehicle here has no significant
existence and value of its own as a concrete entity since the value is
extrinsic (though in the novel, through the process of time, the
“allegorical” meaning is always complicated). Or the value signified
Situationalism 147

is intrinsic to the vehicle, and its apprehension by the recipient


intuitive; this is a method of signification which, again according to
Goethe, “is the true nature of poetry; it renders something concrete,
without thinking of the abstract or pointing to it” (327). Of course,
Goethe’s position is time-bound and has to be expanded in order to
account for modern and postmodern developments (cf. Kafka, or
Barth), but it differentiates quite clearly and saliently two positions
on a scale that allows for many transitions and mixtures. All three
components of the literary symbol unite as aspects of the concrete
symbolic configuration and can be interpreted in different modal
manners (determined seriousness, play, irony, parody, the comic
mode).
Symbolization acts as a means for making up for a deficit of
meaning. It is an assimilative activity. The capacity of symbolic
meaning arises out of the incapacity of explaining and representing
the absent, the ungraspable, but unavoidable, which become only
accessible indirectly, if at all, by the suggestions of symbolic
thinking. The effect of the complication of symbolic experience, of
the definition of its preconditions and of its relevance as strategy of
creating meaning, is complexity. This brings about a paradoxical
state of affairs with contrasting and mutually exclusive positions.
First, symbols, or rather, the tradition of symbolic thinking (i.e., the
use of images that interpret the world as meaningful) is considered
under postmodern conditions to be falsifying reality, i.e., raising
artificial barriers to keep the world at a distance, and thus to reify
interpretations into repressive systems (cf. Kristeva’s contrasting of
mobile, semiotic articulation and symbolic disposition, encouraged
by capitalist society;32 or Lacan’s and Deleuze’s distrust of society’s
symbolic patterning activity). Second, signs and symbols both as
things and language, however, appear to be so much part of our
world and our literature — in our TV-society they seem to obliterate
reality in favor of the constructions of the mind — that one cannot
disregard them, can, at the most, denounce them as clichés. Third, on
a basic psychological level, signs and symbols have an irreplaceable
pragmatic and psychic function. They help to reduce the
unmanageable and unbearable complexity of the world, to make it
translatable into social and personal functions, to give the contingent
order. Symbolic thinking combines with rational thought in
organizing the world. (This is why Lacan, Kristeva, and Deleuze,
148 From Modernism to Postmodernism

though in varying degrees, both distrust and acknowledge the


necessity of such a symbolic signifying practice.) Fourth, as the
result of the signifying interrelation of images and sensory constructs
with characters, actions, and themes, the singular is permeated by
meaning beyond itself; the single occurrence or entity becomes
representative in and for a web of relations. In Kenneth Burke’s
words, “[one] cannot long discuss imagery, [...] without sliding into
symbolism [...] We shift from the image of an object to its
symbolism as soon as we consider it, not in itself alone, but as a
function in a texture of relationships” (281-82).
The conflicting approaches towards the different aspects of
the symbol cannot but make the role of the symbol itself complex.
Just as rational thought develops into the “dialectic of the
enlightenment” (Adorno and Horkheimer) — i.e., the double
function of rationalization of creating order and repression — so
symbolic thinking develops what Habermas in an essay calls the
“dialectic nature of symbolization” (1997) — the innovation and the
reification of meaning by the symbol. A philosophical writer of
fiction, William Gass, refers to this very dialectic when he says in an
interview:
The division that is commonly made between life on the one hand and
literature on the other isn’t tenable. Certainly literature and the language it
contains is a quite different thing from things; but experience, even the
most ordinary kind, contains so much symbolic content, so much
language. For a great many of us in our society, now, a great part of what
we encounter every day is made of symbols. We are overrun with signs.
Some would say that the experience provided by a book is somehow
artificial, not as profound or important as some other experiences. But I
think the testimony of everybody who is interested in literature — or
painting or film or what have you — science — is that this is not the case.
Our experience of signs can often be the most profound and important of
our life. In a way the point of getting control over the things of the world,
non-symbolic nature, if you like, is to begin to surround yourself with the
things which man is most interested in, and those are symbols. In the
broadest way, one’s aim in existence is to transform everything into
symbols — and many of these will be signs, as in literature (LeClair and
McCaffery 169-70).

Though “[t]he desire to understand the world is [...]


ridiculous”, the intellectual and emotional needs that seek to
complete the incomplete cannot be negated. This is true of writer and
reader alike, whatever the form and the force of the stories may be,
Situationalism 149

since postmodern fictions also claim to be “valuable fictions of


humanity, without the ‘assumption’ of which human thought, feeling
and action must wither” (Vaihinger 171, xx). Following this line of
argument, Nelson Goodman adds to the questions, “What are worlds
made of ? How are they made?” another pair, “What role do symbols
play in the making? And how is Worldmaking related to knowing?”
(1978, 1) On the one hand, “the psyche works over the material
presented to it by the sensations [...] with the help of logical forms”,
while on the other hand, “the sensations produce within the psyche
itself [...] subjective processes” (Vaihinger 171) of interpretation and
symbolization. The latter are guided by relations and interrelations
that emerge within the situation and the sequence of situations and
give gestalt to the relation between vehicle and tenor. The signifying
processes move between the poles of image and meaning, situation
and reflection, experience and explanation, but reach beyond ex-
planation and definition. They attain their postmodern gestalt by
rendering the relation between vehicle and tenor instable and
indistinct, in the sense that what the tenor points to is not the
actualized meaning but only the possible significance within the
actual, which then, however, is the actual. According to Cassirer
(who includes concepts in his argument [1953-57, 19, 21-22, 39-40]),
the resulting symbolic configurations are, in Iser’s words, “traces of
the nongiven in the given that would remain inaccessible to
comprehension without such interpolated schemata” (1993, 141).
To become more concrete at this point and to document with
textual examples what has been said about form and force and their
interaction, we will analyze five passages that also exemplify the
tendency of postmodern fiction to fabricate symbols or symbolic
constellations for the representation of the unknowable,
uncontrollable and unrepresentable. They demonstrate the
interrelation between form and force, the actual and the possible,
absence and presence as well as the thematic and perspectival
constellations in the meaning-building process, either with regard to
the vehicle or the tenor, or both, or to the (more or less distinct)
relation between vehicle and tenor. These texts illustrate the range of
the symbol, from a type that quite generally suggests the
complexities of life, to a type that signifies the problematics that
confront an individual subject in its relationship with the world and
its uncertainties, to yet another kind that answers to poetological
150 From Modernism to Postmodernism

questions and parodies (modern) symbolic concepts of totality. They


are all thematically relevant and are determined by the choice and the
clash of perspective(s). In Barth’s The Floating Opera, there is a boat
that is depicted in terms of both the involvement in and detachment
from time, as a wide-open deck with a play going on forever:

The boat wouldn’t be moored, but would drift up and down the river on
the tide, and the audience would sit along both banks. They could catch
whatever part of the plot happened to unfold as the boat floated past, and
then they’d have to wait until the tide ran back again to catch another
snatch of it, if they still happened to be sitting there. To fill in the gaps
they’d have to use their imaginations, or ask more attentive neighbors, or
hear the word passed along from upriver or downriver. Most times they
wouldn’t understand what was going on at all, or they’d think they knew,
when actually they didn’t [...] I needn’t explain that that’s how much of
life works (7).

The symbol is here constructed in typically modern terms as a


“thematic” symbol, which is, announced right in the title of the novel
(as it is in Henry James’s The Golden Bowl or Virginia Woolf’s To
the Lighthouse). The boat is the central symbol that combines
stability and movement, the representation of both the lifeworld and
the fictitious world, that integrates the perspectives of the auctorial,
all-knowing narrator and the knowledge that Andrew Todd, the
protagonist, is going to attain; the boat connects the distancing, ironic
tone and perspective of the narrator with the seriousness of an almost
allegorical, all-comprising view of life, and with a sympathetic view
of the fate of the protagonist which results directly from his attempts
to create meaning. Building boats is Todd’s hobby and represents his
vain attempt to construct worlds of his own. Being subjected to the
impersonal interpretation of life as unavoidable destiny, represented
by the riverboat and its “floating opera”, a theater show, it is only
logical that the frustrated Todd (the name alluding to the German
word Tod, meaning death), in a futile suicide attempt (as a last means
to vanquish life) at the end, wants to blow himself up, together with
the floating opera, which is a thematic symbol of life as a mixture of
“curiosities, melodrama, spectacle, instruction, and entertainment”
(FO 7). The fact that boat and show survive makes clear that, here
and in almost all of Barth’s novels and in postmodernism in general,
life in its diversity serves as the last instance of integration. Life — in
an ironic reversal — is guaranteed by the work of art, a circumstance
Situationalism 151

that foreshadows the conception of the world as language: the


floating opera “floats willy-nilly on the tide of my vagrant prose”
(FO 7). Both kinds of boats, those that represent dreams and those
that depict the “world”, are fictions.
It is typical of Barth that the symbolic vehicle is not a ship
but a boat, that the sea is a river and that the boat does not move to
reach a goal but “drifts” (a postmodern keyword) aimlessly “up and
down the river”, not however on its own volition, but “on the tide”.
The boat-symbol, complemented with the show-symbol, is not seen
from the middle of life’s turmoil but from the distancing viewpoint
of the (postmodern) onlooker. The tenor of the symbol suggests gaps
of understanding and accentuates the role of the imagination in filling
them. The narrator keeps his distance also from the onlookers and
employs his remove for a postmodern playful, slightly ironic attitude
that emphasizes possibility rather than the actuality of the given. The
relation between vehicle and tenor is unequivocal; it indicates a one-
to-one relation between life and boat-show (“I needn’t explain that
that’s how much of life works” [FO 7]), while, however, the tenor
that is life, is diffused in its meanings, actually signifies only gaps,
misunderstandings and the human failure to grasp life, even though
life is right in front of everybody’s eyes, and one has to live through
it. The form factor is embedded in the vehicle, the boat seen from a
distance (detachment being an important characteristic of the
postmodern writer) and in the universalistic, quasi-modern tenor (the
law of life) and the relation between the two (boat and opera
representing life). Yet the (postmodern) force component turns the
actual into the possible and the known into the unknown and
existential seriousness into playful suggestiveness.
In Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, the description of a
painting provides a triple-directed meaning, a universal reference to
life, an indication of the existential situation of the viewer, and also a
poetological statement about postmodern fiction, namely the
necessity of what Federman calls “filling a space (the pages), in those
spaces where there is nothing to write” (1975, 12) — spaces,
however, where one has to write, though there is nothing to write, in
order to fill the void (another keyword of postmodern fiction). The
following passage refers to an incident in Mexico City in the distant
past. Together with her former lover, Pierce Inverary, Oedipa Maas,
152 From Modernism to Postmodernism

the heroine of the book, “somehow wandered into an exhibition of


paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile Remedios Varos”:

In the central painting of a triptych, titled “Bordando el Manto Terrestre”,


were a number of frail girls with heartshaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold
hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of
tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking
hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the
waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and
the tapestry was the world. Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the
painting and cried. No one had noticed; [...] She had looked down at her
feet and known, then, because of a painting, that what she stood on had
only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower,
was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had taken her away
from nothing, there’d been no escape. What did she so desire to escape
from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes
that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental:
that what really keeps her where she is magic, anonymous and malignant,
visited on her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus
except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to
understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines
of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like
embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere
and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else? (CoL
10, my italics)

The vehicles of the symbolic configuration, “the top-room of a


circular tower”, the “frail girls”, “the tapestry which spilled out the
slit windows”, point to the oppositions of enclosure-openness,
actuality-possibility, something-nothing; the tenor interprets the
antitheses of the basic situation in dynamic terms as void, and the
striving to fill the void and its failure, as prison and the futile attempt
at escape, as the (accidental or intentional) workings of anonymous
and malignant powers and the failure to understand them. There is
something to fear and nothing to do. This paradigm of outside power
or emptiness versus personal presence and helplessness suggests a
depleted configuration of the absurd and emphasizes aspects of life
like uncontrollability, unknowability — in short, the ineffable in a
complex chain of references. The relation between vehicle and tenor
is subjective: it personalizes and existentializes meaning; it negates
possibility and hope by emphasizing the both enclosing and empty
actuality.
Situationalism 153

The gist of what Oedipa feels and thinks, and in fact also the
fusion of feeling and thinking in her response, are “thematic” in the
sense that they point forward to the kind of experience she will face
and the way she will react to it during her attempt to make sense out
of her task as executress of Pierce’s will after his death and the
failure of her venture, with all the consequences that the book is to
develop in regard to character and plot. But the painting is more than
a private symbol. Oedipa’s reaction is representative of the more
general desire to leave behind the actual societal prison or closure for
the openness of possibility in spite of the danger of nothingness that
one might confront as a result. The painting and its interpretation
furthermore indicate the difficulty, if not impossibility, of
representing the experience of facing the void and trying to fill it, and
the failure in the attempt of representation (“embroidering a kind of
tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into the void, seeking
too hopelessly to fill the void”). Finally, the sum of the painting’s
meaning, on an abstract level, is the struggle between actuality and
possibility, possibility and impossibility. The experience of
impossibility, which is unrepresentable, is cast at the end of the
quoted passage in terms of playfully incongruous possibilities that all
would be futile and lead to nothing, leaving Oedipa in the state of
not-knowing and indecision. The force factor here informs the
circumscribable content of the vehicle, the painting, as desire to
escape prison and to understand the world and the self. As a formal
corollary of the undecidable and the non-understandable, the symbol
invents the tenor with a multi-perspective, an ever-widening,
multivalent meaning that branches out into private existence,
universal void, and the problem of representation.
In the first two examples the symbol has a synecdochal
structure, the part referring to the whole, while the postmodern
metaphorical, i.e., constructionist, structure of these symbols
announces itself in the multiplicity of levels of meaning and the role
of reflection that characterize the tenor (Oedipa), in our third
example from Barthelme’s novel The Dead Father, the author
reduces the psychological factor of experience and increases the play
factor, while in the process both constructing and deconstructing the
symbol. He plays gleefully with all totalizing concepts, those of
metaphysics, social relations, individuality, and aesthetics (of
modernism), by making the Dead Father the overstrained symbolic
154 From Modernism to Postmodernism

vehicle of almost all possible meanings. This produces a relationship


between vehicle and tenor that is ludicrous, but that nevertheless
indicates the serious dialectic of dead and alive, father and son,
modernism and postmodernism:

Now he expands his emblem of the word — the Dead Father — and has it
include any particularized belief system (honor, law, truth, tradition, art)
and any human experience (the parent) which creates and structures one’s
reality. The Dead Father hence has the function of God, or any value made
absolute, which defines, governs, and then limits. [...] He is the father, the
authority, in every structure context — anthropological, literary,
psychological, philosophical, mythic, and so on. He is the archetypal
father, the force of history, time, and experience, from which every child
struggles in his weaning toward authenticity, originality and identity (DF
162-163).

Here both the vehicle, the Dead Father, whose shape is gigantic and
indistinct, and the tenor, which dissolves into serial additions of
incongruous roles, lose their circumscribability. The Dead Father is
indefinable in terms of body, soul, or spirit, except that he represents
authority, and the tenor is informed by the ridiculous attempt at
totality by mechanical accumulation of aspects and roles. One
function is joined to the next, not in the endeavor to make sense by
integrating the single items into a whole but to ironize and reject
totalizing (modernist) meaning-building processes. The form is
exploded by the force factor, which here lies in the energetic
perspectives of evaluation, play, irony, parody and the comic mode,
which, however, as almost always in postmodern fiction, play around
death and the void and try to fill the gaps of life and fiction by
figurations of the imagination. What is deconstructed in a com-
bination of image and explanation (which do not support each other
but render their relation contingent) is the creation of an all-
encompassing synthesis of authority, and of what one might call —
in analogy to Frank Kermode’s “concord fiction” — an (ironized)
“concord symbol”. If such concord symbols are used in postmodern
fiction, they are comicalized, as in this case, by the incongruous
relationship between vehicle and tenor and the ridiculously
exaggerated range of meaning that flips over into meaninglessness in
a “tilting game” (Iser) of “coherent deformation” (Merleau-Ponty,
qtd. in Iser 1993, 231).
Situationalism 155

In our fourth example, life and art are conceived by Barth in


contrasting terms as spiral (in other examples as Moebius strip, or
labyrinth, etc.) and as circle. In the “Dunyazadiad”, from Chimera,
Barth evokes the image of the logarithmic spiral and contrasts it to
the circle in order to set two possibilities of confronting existence
and imaginative creativity, a positive and a negative one, against one
another. The opposition serves both to explain and dramatize the
unexplainable and uncontrollable in both life and imagination. It
correlates character, life, and art in a way that is typical of Barth, and
not only of him. The Genie explains his project to Scheherezade and
Dunyazade:

‘My project,’ he told us, ‘is to learn where to go by discovering where I


am by reviewing where I’ve been — where we’ve all been. There’s a kind
of snail in the Maryland marshes — perhaps I invented him — that makes
his shell as he goes along out of whatever he comes across, cementing it
with his own juices, and at the same time makes his path instinctively
toward the best available material for his shell; he carries his history on his
back, living in it, adding new and larger spirals to it from the present as he
grows. That snail’s pace has become my pace — but I’m going in circles,
following my own trail! I’ve quit reading and writing; I’ve lost track of
who I am; my name’s just a jumble of letters; so’s the whole body of
literature: strings of letters and empty spaces, like a code that I’ve lost the
key to’ (Ch 18).

The snail is not, like the boat in The Floating Opera, a suggestive
synecdochal bearer of meaning as a suggestive part in a universal
whole, a significant theater stage for the play of life. The vehicle here
is much more complex in form and status. To begin with the status, it
is both actual and fictitious (“I perhaps invented him”). The form of
the snail grows and changes until its own properties like slowness,
patience, instinctual rightness in collecting its materials and finding
its way, are concentrated and abstracted into the figure of the spiral,
the abstract and concrete spatial figuration of replenishment which
Barth employs in many of his texts as image of the negentropic
function of storytelling.
The vehicle is thus layered in itself. The tenor emerges out of
both the dynamics of the vehicle, of movement and growth, and the
different strata of knowledge and creativity, but it signifies only in
relation to the Genie, his creativity as story-teller and his actual
entropic situation. The snail and the spiral (set against the circle)
represent an alternative possibility of life and creativity that is out of
156 From Modernism to Postmodernism

reach for the Genie, or so it seems. His circling, in contrast to the


spiraling of the snail, does not suggest replenishment but only
“empty spaces”, the return of the same, disorientation, and affliction.
However, the circle can be seen in relation to the spiral, as its
reduction, but perhaps also as the starting point for replenishment.
Possibility again balances actuality. The tenors of circle and
spiral together signify both entropy and creativity and the conquest of
entropy by the negentropic energies of storytelling. The Genie in
another passage suggests his wish to return to the sources of
storytelling. The form of the vehicle is here not “natural”, but
constructionist and doubled (body/ motions of the snail and the
spiral), just as the tenor is. The result is an all-encompassing symbol
of the situation of the writer in Barth’s texts, for instance in Lost in
the Funhouse. Barth himself says in an interview:

There’s a marine animal I’m fond of (I don’t think I invented him, though
maybe I improved on him). He’s a crustacean who creates his spiral shell
as he goes along. The materials he encounters are assimilated into it, and at
the same time he more or less intuitively directs his path toward the kinds
of material shells are best made of. How I love that animal! He’s the
perfect image for me. He moves at a snail’s pace (and I do, too). He wears
his history on his back all the time, but it’s not just a burden; he’s living in
it [...] (now I know I’m making him up) (Gado 129).

One last example of the postmodern use of the symbol comes


from another highly symbolic work, Gass’s The Tunnel. The
protagonist, William Frederick Kohler, a history professor who has
written a book about Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany,
reflects about the death of Magus Tabor, who had taught him, “don’t
deal with the unnamed, they are without signification; remember, to
be is to be enunciated — said, sung, shouted — to be syllabated”
(Tun 277). Only naming means signifying. Tabor said:

I was a word, therefore I was; and while I was a word, brief as a breath,
held in the head or sustained on paper, prolonged in print, bound as a
book, I was like licketty, you understand, like a term on one of the tablets
of the gods, like lights made of stars flicked on and off to say: here I am,
I’m stage, I’m song, I’m printed on the ticket; so Tabor could die in a
thousand descriptions, although each way only once: once as a
disturbance, once as a sign from the gods, once as a penalty, once to
signify the unfairness of fundamental things, once to be symbolic of his
soul’s strife, once to remind me of what he taught, once to be simply
Situationalism 157

another number in the census of the dead that day, the day — evening,
midnight, dawn — he did it — it did it — died (Tun 277).

The vehicle, the character as symbol, Magus Tabor, is, or rather, was,
actual and remains a constant in the game of accumulating reference.
But the tenor multiplies, and the relation between vehicle and tenor
becomes indistinct, to say the least. Form is overcome by force,
stability by movement, and dissemination of meaning. Significance is
the plurality of possibilities; they fill “one’s arena of empty
awareness” and disentangle the “thicket of concealment” (Tun 312).
Life and death span the widest range of possibilities; they include the
essential as well as the trivial. That possibility in the novel is force
and energy, is underlined by the fact that the book, in addition to
passages like this, continually symbolizes the plurality of
possibilities. It does so by a wide variety of different types of print
and spatial arrangements of the text on the page, by an interaction of
prose and poetry, high style and low style, and references to almost a
hundred other writers, philosophers and scientists and their versions
of truth. They mirror further, comparable possibilities, thus
establishing a network of intertextual references that symbolize the
infinity of possible enunciations of what life, death and art are.
As has become evident, the crucial factor in symbolic
thinking in postmodern fiction is not the vehicle or the tenor but the
relation between the two, or rather, the process of relationing in
general, which is both independent of and dependent on symbolic
meaning. In the extreme case, as Lyotard notes, “to link is necessary;
how to link is contingent” (1988, 29). Beckett, arguing both from
modernist and postmodernist positions, speaks to the point:

[V]an Velde is [...] the first to submit wholly to the incoercible absence of
relation, in the absence of terms or, if you like, in the presence of
unavailable terms, the first to admit that to be an artist is to fail, as no other
dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion [...] I
know that all that is required now [...] is to make of this submission, this
admission, this fidelity to failure, a new occasion, a new term of relation,
and of the act which, unable to act, obliged to act, he makes, an expressive
act, even if only of itself, of its impossibility, of its obligation (Beckett and
Duthuit 21).

After Beckett, the act of finding “a new term of relation”,


and one might add, relation between deconstructive/reconstructive
force and the forms of control, is the constant task and failure of the
158 From Modernism to Postmodernism

artist; and both the task and the failure call forth and limit the
symbol-building process, whose vertical structure of form is replaced
by an additive, “horizontal” one of desire and force that, dissolving
static form, looks for new, dynamic form. Force builds up its own
symbolic potential, but it does so — in C. G. Ogden’s words, from a
discussion of Jeremy Bentham’s theory of fiction — under an
“ingenious Logic of ‘incomplete symbols’” (cxlviii) — incomplete
because, in the postmodern case, its tenor is diffused, can only be
diffused, is even obscured by narrative complexity. This complexity
is again symbolic in its artistic status. According to Barth, it “turns
the artist’s mode or form into a metaphor [or symbol] for his
concerns”. Barth strives for what he calls “the Principle of
Metaphoric Means”, “the investiture by the writer of as many
elements and aspects of his fiction as possible with emblematic as
well as dramatic value: not only the ‘form’ of the story, the narrative
viewpoint, the tone, and such, but, where manageable, the particular
genre, the mode and the medium, the very process of narration —
even the fact of artifice itself” (Ch 203, Barth’s italics). Here form is
no longer representative of content, but mirrors the state of the
artifice, its artificiality and self-reflexivity. But one can still discern
the kinship with the modern totalizing symbol, the difference,
however, being that the symbolizing vehicle is the total creative
process of the text in all its aspects, and not a centered structure, a
“spatial”, thematic constellation of meaning-giving simultaneity, and
that the tenor does not point to (problems of) identity, awareness, or
any kind of existential condition, but to the imagination, its creative
task, and the result of its activity.
Since there are no longer “natural” or essentialist relations
that point to pre-stabilized wholeness, vehicle and tenor of the
symbol and the relation between the two are open to willful
construction, which leads to the fantastification of the vehicle and,
concomitantly, the expression of the tenor in mere fantastic terms of
possibility. In other words, the relations between vehicle and tenor
are made artificial; they are aestheticized. The mode of relating them
to one another is no longer synecdochal, i.e., substantialist-relational
(Platonic), setting the part for the whole, which is only possible as
long as a substantial similarity between vehicle and tenor exists.
Furthermore, it is not a metonymic symbol; the latter works in terms
of contiguity, i.e., does not constitute “linked analogies” (Ahab) but
Situationalism 159

sets up a single phenomenon in itself without it acting as the


substantial part of a whole, as the synecdochal symbol does. It makes
use of the fact that meaning is established with the help of
associations that connect contrastive relations in terms of contiguity,
by evoking the “consciousness of a paradigm” (R. Barthes) in the
reader, who calls up the pattern of opposites. Then it is possible that
rain in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms refers to mishap and
distress because in the consciousness of the reader it implies the
opposite, sunshine and dryness, even though in the book the sun
never shines, and so the other pole of the opposition thus is not
established or emphasized.
The postmodern symbol is neither synecdochal nor meto-
nymic; it is “metaphorical”33 in the sense that it has a constructionist
form that depends on aesthetic designs that do not grow out of but
are imposed on the material. As quoted above, Sukenick, speaking of
Federman’s The Voice in the Closet, says, “you simply impose a
form on your materials, it not really mattering how this form was
generated. Calvino does the same kind of thing” (LeClair and
McCaffery 291); and Federman notes, interchanging the terms
metaphor and symbol: “I still have to find the image, the metaphor
which will sustain the novel. That too is crucial to my writing, or to
much of so-called postmodern fiction: it relies strongly on a central
metaphor [...] My role, once I have set up [or imposed] the metaphor,
is to decipher the meaning of that metaphor and write its symbolic
meaning [one might add: in terms of possibility]. That will be the
novel” (LeClair and McCaffery 129). Finding and (consciously or
unconsciously) imposing symbolic meaning are here the same thing.
Elkin says: “I’m conscious of symbols and patterns in my work. But
this is something I’ve sometimes come on to only after the fact and
then made the most of” (LeClair and McCaffery 108). Gass notes: “I
keep fussing around, trying to find ways to symbolize what I want.
[...] A particular piece is likely to be the exploration of a symbol or a
certain set of symbols, and this constrains the text. No meaning can
go away without returning” (LeClair and McCaffery 162, 168).
Federman has invented perhaps the most drastic of metaphorical
symbols with a most rigidly and willfully imposed tenor: “For me,
masturbation is simply a gesture which may carry symbolic or
metaphorical possibilities. It’s in this sense that one must read the
masturbation scene [in Take It Or Leave It] that follows the jam
160 From Modernism to Postmodernism

session in the jazz scene. In other words, masturbation, whether


performed singly or collectively, can be symbolic of heroic gestures,
just as it can be an act of cowardice or escape” (LeClair and
McCaffery 133). The metaphorical symbol relies on the creative act
of the mind, on the imagination, which is able to constitute sense-
making configurations in unlimited number and without restriction
on whatever materials it chooses. As a result, the relation between
sign and referent becomes variable, forced open to transformation; it
is no longer clearly founded in, or limited by, a specific concrete
entity, an organic vehicle that points to an organic wholeness. The
fact that it is not the similarity in substance that counts, but only
similarity in structure, in willfully imposed structure, opens up an
infinite number of links between vehicle and tenor, makes the
metaphorical symbol not only an important epistemological
instrument in the processes of the mind but also the creator of
ontological alternatives. It is a concentrated playing field, as it were,
for form as pattern, as self-reflexivity, as collage, rhythm, theme, and
perspective and thus informs about the formal aspects of postmodern
fiction in toto.
In postmodern fiction the symbolic method is defined by the
preconditions of situationalism (and the failure to overcome it), by
possibility thinking, by the paradigms of appearance versus dis-
appearance, presence versus absence, possibility versus actuality, a
fact which leads to a willful imposition of meaning, which again
leads to a tension between vehicle and tenor and a diffusion of
meaning. One can interpret this development of the symbolic method
as a weakening of the strong categories, not only of thought, but also
of narrative signification. This weakness is the outcome of the failure
to impose a figurating form of wholeness on the force of the
situation. Nietzsche’s “perspectivism” has come to dominate the
symbolic method, as, of course, it already did in Melville’s Moby-
Dick. However, in postmodern fiction it is no longer a psychological
or epistemological perspectivism but an ontological one, dominated
by the energetics of force. Force unfolds its power in creating
fantastic worlds, in giving them form by freely distributing and
adjusting all possible perspectives of evaluation, in superimposing
one stance on the other and changing them at will, thus attaining its
own form through possibility, simultaneity, and play, play being the
only remaining synthesis, though in fact it is no synthesis.
Situationalism 161

Of course play has to have a substratum, and this is not


independent of character. If the play with perspectives focuses
directly on a character, it is no longer a substance in its own right but
a kind of mirror for other people who make of it a metaphorical
constructionist symbol, with a self-serving narrow and, by
multiplication, wide-ranging tenor. In Omensetter’s Luck, according
to Gass, Omensetter’s “unreflective, prelapsarian presence” acts like
an undefined material to be used by other people for the needs and
purposes of their own symbolic disposition, and “assumes fearful
symbolic dimensions”. He “strikes various people in town as a sort
of reflector, precisely receptive to symbolizing because he appears
not to do so. So each character in the novel is busy turning
Omensetter into a kind of material for the symbols they wish to
make” (Ziegler and Bigsby 153-54). The relation between vehicle
and tenor here turns arbitrary and contingent. Indeed, “this
unreflective, natural, threatening character is a symbol for the
concrete moment when all reflection breaks down, when those who
reflect on different levels of consciousness can no longer com-
municate. Does Omensetter represent the opacity of the relation
between reality and the imagination ?” (Ziegler and Bigsby 153).
The symbolic design in fact can now only function by taking
on the form of the as-if and is thus a construct of both actuality and
possibility. The result of the instability of symbolic meaning and the
tension between vehicle and tenor is such that the created worlds
appear not in “depth” but in surface representation, and that the
method of combining signifying entities is ultimately arbitrary or
serial in the sense that all causal and analogical symbolic meanings
are relativized to such a degree that they become metaphorical, are
situationalized and serialized. The only way to achieve wholeness via
symbolism is to “transcend the artifice by insisting on it” (Barth),
i.e., to make every situation transparent for its constructedness and
the constructedness of the artifice. The wholeness achievable is then
the determination of all signifying by language and all narrative by
self-consciousness. Signification, as it were, goes out into the
fictional world and in a circle or spiral returns back, signifying itself
as artifact. According to Ambrose Mensch, the alter ego of the author
in LETTERS, “the real treasure (and our story’s resolution) may be
the key itself: illumination, not solution, of the Scheme of Things”
(768). The symbolic method of postmodern fiction makes quite clear
162 From Modernism to Postmodernism

that its central dialectic is that which already characterized


modernism, the striving for meaning and its failure, with the
difference that the failure is fully translated into form and
perspectivized in multifarious ways by play, irony, and the comic
mode. The attempt at control by aesthetic design may be considered
the inheritance from modern narrative; the knowledge and playful
acceptance of the failure of control (because of the multiplication of
relations, the situationalizing and serializing of composition) is the
postmodern deconstructive and reconstructive ingredient of the
symbol. We will come back to the symbolic mode in another context,
that of “spatial form”.
4. Philosophy and Postmodern American
Fiction: Patterns of Disjunction, Complementarity and
Mutual Subversion

Symbolic signification creates an indirect evaluation of the


world; reflection is an explanatory activity that problematizes the
world. Both are activities of consciousness and interrelate in the
production of meaning or the rejection of meaning. In order to assess
the activity of consciousness or, rather, the epistemological, ethical,
and aesthetic preconditions of thought in American postmodern
fiction, we will change the perspective and proceed with a direct
comparison between fiction and philosophy under a number of
differentiating aspects. Postmodern narrative is indeed the most
philosophical narrative in the history of the genre. Though
philosophical and literary enterprises go about their common busi-
ness in different orderings, they complete and complement, interfere
with and deconstruct one another, establishing favorable and
unfavorable relations. In the American postmodern novel, philo-
sophical thought and scientific knowledge are openly cited or tacitly
invoked, consciously infused into the character’s motivations and
reflections, or unconsciously articulated as significant information. In
addition to direct influences, the parallel concerns between thinkers
and writers, philosophical thought, and narrative practice are
important. If, as Sartre holds, “[a] fictional technique always relates
back to the novelist’s metaphysics” and the “critic’s task is to define
the latter before evaluating the former” (1966, 87), and if, in
Umberto Eco’s terms, “writing a novel is a cosmological matter”
(1984a, 20), the primary question is: which are the most productive,
perhaps even necessary philosophies, cosmologies and systems of
belief that can form the framework of thought and feeling for
postmodern American writers and their texts, and mold the
constructions of fiction, which, according to Gass, “are persistently
philosophical” (1970, 17). To put it another way, the question is, in
Barth’s words, “which [concepts] are in fact among the indispensable
intellectual baggage of our narrative-historical moment” (OwS 101).
Barth in fact speaks of the “poignant but playful ‘postmodern’ spin-
offs from notable scientific or philosophical propositions: Zeno’s
164 From Modernism to Postmodernism

paradoxes, Schrödinger’s wave-function equations, whatever”(OwS


149).
Though there are innumerable kinds of interactions in
practice, the relationship between literature and philosophy in
general terms might be said to be fourfold.34 It is characterized by
antagonism, by compensation and complementarity, by de-dif-
ferentiation and disjunction, and by mutual subversion. The link
between the two disciplines is of course closely bound up with the
conceptual direction and the narrative pattern of the text, as well as
with the evaluation of reflection. The systematic approach in the
following sections serves six purposes at once. (1) The basic
categories of interrelation chosen here reveal quite generally
something about the relationship between philosophy and literature.
(2) These categories are used to point out important philosophical
positions and theoretical trends that have become crucial for
postmodern writers. (3) In each case the categories interrelate
specific theories and the response to them by the writers, either in
utterances within their fictional texts or in their other statements. (4)
They allow us to identify some important differences between
modern and postmodern fiction. (5) They prepare the ground and
initiate the discussion of notions like the “real”, the abstract, the
fantastic, the absurd, and meta-fiction, play, paradox, negation, and
entropy, concepts that are central for the analysis of postmodern
fiction. (6) The detailing of the positions of postmodern writers will
serve as an introduction to their personally specific approaches to
fiction.

4.1. Antagonism

The relationship between philosophy and literature can


follow an antagonistic pattern, which leads to the exclusion of the
respective other. But the dislike need not be uttered openly. In
William Gass’s words: “To be so close in blood, so brotherly and
like in body, can inspire a subtle hate; for their rivalry is sometimes
less than open in its damage” (1970, 4). Either philosophy can
exclude art from the truth-seeking strategies (Plato), and its allegedly
complete rationality can look with suspicion at what has been called
the “philosophical imaginary”, which constitutes “the shameful face
of philosophy” (LeDœuff Philosophical Imaginary 20); or, con-
Philosophy and Postmodern American Fiction 165

versely, philosophy could devalue its own rationality in favor of


literature and art (Nietzsche). In literature, the aesthetic of
representation aiming at concreteness turns against the abstractness
of thought as something alien to literature. Hegel paved the way for
the separation of art from philosophy by his understanding of the
former as sensory expression, for which reflection is something
external. In modern literature, the emphasis on bodily consciousness,
on subconscious levels of experience, and the narrative method of
indirection were in many cases not conducive to the inclusion of
rational thought, least of all the discussion of philosophical concepts.
Hemingway marks the extreme of an anti-intellectual attitude that
shields literature from intellectual endeavors of the abstract kind,
particularly when he says “For a writer to put his own intellectual
musings, which he might sell for a low price as essays, into the
mouths of artificially constructed characters which are more
remunerative when issued as people in a novel is good economics,
perhaps, but does not make literature” (DiA 191). The theory of
narration mostly clung to the rejection of the “dictatorship of ideas”.
Terms like “epic interpretation” opened then a new approach to
reflection in the novel by avoiding categorical separations and
suggesting that “[d]ecisive is not the popular or subtle character of
the argument but the degree to which it assimilates itself to the epic”
(Meyer 18).
For another part of modern literature (as we will see later),
and for postmodern fiction in general, the integration of philosophy
and reflection into the novel is no problem. On the contrary, what has
been called postmodern meta-fiction aims at the inclusion of various
discourses, including philosophical ones. Still, in postmodern
narrative most of the more systematic theories are excluded, rejected,
or played with. Obviously all essentialistic, rationalistic, and
totalizing philosophical notions are problematic for postmodern
aesthetics, because they, as it were, one-sidedly impose form over
force. Examples are Freud’s psychoanalytic theories and the
essentialistic notions of Existentialism (though, as will be shown
later, they remained useful for a number of authors in defining their
counter-positions or their nostalgia, their sense of loss). Here Freud
may exemplify the postmodern rejection (or reconception) of what
was conceived as modern thought and psychological theory. Though
Freud initiated what Thomas Pynchon called “the new science of the
166 From Modernism to Postmodernism

mind” (V. 383), and though his theories opened up a large area of
uncertainty in the human psyche by separating the unconscious from
the conscious and making the irrational at least as important in terms
of force as the rational is in terms of form, his rationalizing model-
building nevertheless made him an object of suspicion. Indeed, most
of the postmodern novelists see their age as post-Freudian (and post-
psychological) and turn against what they perceive as the
rationalistic, universalistic, transhistorical, and transcultural nature of
Freud’s theory.
Still, more often than not, they use him as one of their
reference points. Pynchon again refers to our time as “this Freudian
period of history” (V. 382) and quite generally uses the concept of
the unconscious as frame of reference for the obsession and paranoia
of his characters. In The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), for instance, he
playfully relates Oedipa Maas’s paranoiac quest for the underground
Tristero System of communication to Freud’s Oedipal rebellion. His
reservations towards Freud show more clearly in V. (1963). In order
to articulate his contempt for psychoanalysis, Pynchon replaces the
role of the psychoanalyst with a character by the name of Eigenvalue,
a dentist: “Back around the turn of the century, psychoanalysis had
usurped from the priesthood the role of the father-confessor. Now, it
seemed, the analyst in his turn was about to be deposed by, of all
people, the dentist” (V. 138). Beckett in his postmodern text How It
Is creates an obscene parody of Freudian and Darwinian thought by
connecting psychology with scatology and offensive, pornographic
speech, thus trying, in his own words, to introduce “the mess” that
“invades our experience of every moment” into the text, and “to find
a form that accommodates the mess”, which he sees as “the task of
the artist now” (qtd. in Bair 523). In Gaddis’s The Recognitions,
Freud is referred to with mocking laughter: “Freud ... came borne in
a pleasing Bostonbred voice from a tall girl. — Hahaha ... Freud my
ass” (Rec 509). Barthelme, in the fourth part of his story “Brain
Damage” from City Life, ironizes the by now allegedly clichéd
Freudian interpretation of dreams (“phallic symbol”, engulfed by the
vaginal cliffs “that rush forward threateningly” [CL 137]); in Snow
White he parodies Freudian thought and psychological methods in
pseudo-learned digressions and a questionnaire; and in The Dead
Father he uses the idea of Oedipal rebellion and Freud’s and Lacan’s
“dead Father” (the internalization of authority as conscience) for the
Philosophy and Postmodern American Fiction 167

patterning of his novel. Ishmael Reed in his novel Mumbo Jumbo


derogatively refers to Freud and the Freudians directly or indirectly
more than ten times, calling Freud “the later Atonist” (rationalist,
categorizer), “a big fan of Moses, Cromwell and other militarists”
(MJ 192), “who refined the rhetoric of the Church” (197), and called
occultism in America “The Black Tide of the Mud” (238), and who
in fact took care that “Exorcism becomes Psychoanalysis, Hex
becomes Death Wish, Possession becomes Hysteria” (244). In Gass’s
The Tunnel, the historian Kohler is in the habit of reflecting about
himself with continuous reference to thinkers, writers, painters, etc.:
“No. I’ll dismiss the past as brusquely as a dishonest servant [...] I
have Bartlett’s Quotations. Do I consult that. Like a wonderful
physician, will it prescribe for me? so many drops of Proust, a
tincture of Old Testament, daily dose of Freud, and I shall peel off
my past like a sticker warning FRAGILE” (Tun 55). And then there
is Nabokov, whose aversion to Freud could scarcely be expressed
more succinctly: “an Austrian crank with a shabby umbrella” (RL
116).
Sukenick turns against psychology in general because “there
are epistemological [and one might add, ontological] reasons before
there are psychological reasons” (Bellamy 1974, 74). Appearing in
person as a writer in his novel 98.6, he calls “psychology [...] the
trademark of a previous era”, sets “psychosynthesis” in the place of
the rationality of psychoanalysis, and creates his companions in the
book not as “psychological creatures” but (in terms of the philosophy
of Life) as “creatures of biology and chance” (122-23). Barthelme
follows suit. He answers a question about depth: “If you mean doing
psychological studies of some kind, no, I’m not so interested. ‘Going
beneath the surface’ has all sorts of positive-sounding associations,
as if you were a Cousteau of the heart. I’m not sure there’s not just as
much to be seen if you remain a student of the surface” (LeClair and
McCaffery 43).

4.2. Compensation and Complementarity

In the literary text, the complementarity between art and


philosophy serves the interrelation between narration and reflection.
It takes the form of a balancing act between the concrete and the
abstract, description and reflection, emotion and thought. Early on
168 From Modernism to Postmodernism

Friedrich Schlegel said: “Philosophy and poetry are to be united”;


“novels are the Socratic dialogues of our time” (200, 186).
Considering the historical moment, Georg Lukács in his Theory of
the Novel pleads for the inclusion of reflection in the novel.
Furthermore, the narrative figure’s act of reflection is the expression
of its subjectivity, its “reflexive relation” to disparate reality; the
narrator’s act of reflection serves as correction to the subjective
perspective and is the expression of a “normative objectivity” (74). It
is not accidental that Herman Meyer developed his concept of “epic
integration” while analyzing Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain,
an eminently reflexive and philosophical novel. The German
reflexive novel of Thomas Mann, Hermann Broch (The Sleep
Walkers) and Robert Musil (The Man Without Properties), but also
André Gide’s intellectual novels, especially The Counterfeiters, and
Aldous Huxley’s novels of ideas, for instance Point Counter Point,
includes a great quantity of reflection, of philosophical and scientific
thought. They respond not only to the new thinking in terms of
wholeness that emerged from modern concepts of art but also
directly to the epistemological and ethical problematics of the time
and the uncertain situation of the subject in the wake of the findings
of the natural sciences, of logic, and psychology since the end of the
nineteenth century. Hermann Broch demands the inclusion of “the
spirit of the epoch and its scientific character” and denounces the
“solely narrative as deception of the intellect”. The task of The
Sleepwalkers was to show in the “field of tension between
representation and reflection that which the purely scientific article
cannot express” (qtd. in Steinecke 55, 72, my transl.). The late
modernist Saul Bellow writes: “There is nothing left for us novelists
to do but to think. For unless we make a clearer estimate of our
condition, we will [...] fail in our function” (20).
The complementarity between modern science, philosophy,
and literature reaches in its basic trends far into postmodernism. A
number of names are here useful for their suggestive power, though,
of course, distinctions have to be made with regard to the influence
of those theorists either on modernism, or on both modernism and
postmodernism, or specifically on postmodern writers. It is easy to
see that the revolutionary discoveries in the natural sciences are
fundamental for both modernism and postmodernism, that the
existentialist philosophers step into the foreground with the
Philosophy and Postmodern American Fiction 169

modernists but are marginalized in postmodernism, just like Freud’s


psychoanalytical system. Nietzsche on the other hand holds sway
over both modernism and postmodernism, which however discuss
quite different traits in his ambiguous notions (see Koelb). Language
theory, finally, cannot develop its full influence in modern literature
because the latter’s belief in the mimetic and expressive power of
language (and art) is generally unbroken. Relativity, indeterminacy,
multi-perspectivity influence especially the concept of language in
the postmodern novel.
What is attractive in the theories of science for the
postmodern author are the theorems of uncertainty, indeterminacy,
and discontinuity, and the view that all scientific theories are only
fictitious models of reality. Einstein’s theory of relativity challenges
the Newtonian theory of gravity, while Planck’s quantum physics
paves the way for a logic of discontinuity. Heisenberg’s uncertainty
principle states the impossibility of determining simultaneously both
the position and velocity of a nuclear particle without falling prey to
indeterminacy in one way or the other. Niels Bohr’s principle of
complementarity considers not just one but two contradictory
theories as true (by defining light as both particles and waves), and
Gödel’s theorem of incompleteness maintains that illogic is part of
any system’s logic. They all substitute a state of indeterminacy, mere
possibility, even randomness for the traditional classical certainty in
physics. Sukenick, representative for many of his colleagues in his
references to science, in his novel 98.6 raises the question “particles
or waves”, refers to the “principle of uncertainty”, sees discontinuity
in “the principle of probability” (169), speaks of “Schrodinger’s
wave equation” (184) and of “quantum mechanics” (170). These
cross-references allow him to ponder about “life’s energy”, the
indeterminacy and unpredictability of life, the problem of “attuning
to the cosmos”, the ideal union and connection that waves represent,
and, most importantly, about the imagination through which one
perceives “the improbabilities of the unknown” (98.6 170). In the
same novel, Albert Einstein appears in a conversation with Golda
Meir, as reported by her to the author Sukenick who is also a person
in the book; just like Sukenick, Einstein chooses experience over
theory, because “[e]xperience alone can decide on truth” (186).
Barth, well-versed in theory, turns to the epistemology of
observation: In the title-story of Lost in the Funhouse, Ambrose “lost
170 From Modernism to Postmodernism

himself in the reflection that the necessity for an observer makes


perfect observation impossible” (90). Barth, who likes metaphors like
the Moebius strip or the echo for the description of his concepts and
strategies of narrative, like Sukenick refers to “Schrödinger’s
quantum-mechanical wave-function equations” (and to “Einstein’s
relativity theories [...] and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle”), and
makes the wave the central figuration defining life and story. In his
collection On with the Story, one of the stories is called “‘Waves,’ by
Amien Richard”. It is a “waves-or-particles story”, with the waves
clearly winning out as an image of everything that is alive, including
the imagination and the story: “Waves everywhere, [...] Our bodies
are waves [...] their particular constituents ever in flux”. Our selves
are “[w]aves, definitely: mere ever-changing configurations of
memories and characteristics embodied in those other waves, our
minds and bodies. [...] indeed, all human relationships are waves [...]
both our life stories and [...] our made-up [...] stories: waves waves
waves, propagated from mind to mind and heart to heart through the
medium of language via these particles called words”. And while
adding the wave image the notion of multiplicity, while
demonstrating that, in analogy to our lives, there are in narrative
plural “[l]ife-stories. Life-or-death stories. Stories-within-stories
stories”, Barth refers to “the ‘multiverse’ [instead of a “particular
universe”] reading of quantum mechanics” (OwS 101, 107, 143, 181,
251).
Pynchon, to give another example, makes use of scientific
and science-related notions like entropy, relativity, gravity, tech-
nological control, in order to gain multiple vantage points for his
stories. He employs references to scientific epistemology, to Gödel
and Heisenberg. Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), of which it has been said
that things are more important than people and ideas more important
than things (cf. Simmon),35 makes the Rocket’s “terrible passage”
into an “elegant blend of philosophy and hardware” (239), and refers,
in the incessant cross-references to ideas, to the emerging “new
Uncertainty” after “categories have been blurred badly” (303). He
mentions Gödel and Heisenberg directly. Gödel is used when an
argument is in the danger of closure: “And yet, and yet: there is
Murphy’s law to consider, that brash Irish proletarian restatement of
Gödel’s Theorem — when everything has been taken care of, when
nothing can go wrong, or even surprise us ... something will” (GR
Philosophy and Postmodern American Fiction 171

275, Pynchon’s ellipsis). When no definite explanation can be found,


Heisenberg is the reference point: “We seem up against a dilemma
built into Nature, much like the Heisenberg situation. There is nearly
complete parallelism between analgesia and addiction” (GR 348).
Connections are also made without giving names: “It appears we
can’t have one property without the other, any more than a particle
physicist can specify position without suffering an uncertainty as to
the particle’s velocity” (GR 348). In Gaddis’s The Recognitions, the
allusions to scientists like Einstein and Heisenberg and a number of
philosophers (Democritus, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Zeno,
Nietzsche, Vaihinger, etc.) are finally turned into irrelevant and
incongruent pieces of conversation, exhibiting the narrator’s spirit of
parody and satire. Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty comes to be
illustrated in a film with “sand fleas” as “metaphor for the theoretical
and the real situation” (Rec 640).
As is well-known and need only be mentioned here, the
concept of entropy, the theory laid down in the second law of
thermodynamics, is all-important for Barth, Pynchon, and their
colleagues. The concept of entropy, the belief that the energies in a
closed system (and the world as a closed system) are being
exhausted, that differences are being blurred as enough energy is no
longer available for “work”, and that mere randomness is the true
nature of what seemed an orderly system — all this provides
literature and the arts with the “scientific” reason for the loss of
metaphysical meaning and the decline of culture. Henry Adams was
a precursor of this view of universal and cultural entropy. Pynchon
picked up the thread and made it one of the central ideas of his work.
He in fact writes a programmatic short story “Entropy”; in Gravity’s
Rainbow the “several entropies” (302) — in physics, communication
theory and culture — are philosophic underpinnings of his work.
Vonnegut employs the notion of entropy in Cat’s Cradle (1963) in
order to characterize the ending of the world as the result of
technological progress; and Barth applies it to the exhaustion of
literary forms (1984). Barth would not be the philosophical author
that he is if he did not formulate the concept of entropy directly as
“frame”, as part of self-reflection in his fiction. A key phrase in the
“Posttape” to Giles Goat-Boy (1966) reads: “Late or soon, we lose.
Sudden or slow, we lose. [...] There is an entropy to time, a tax on
change” (707). Yet though the world may be a closed system and
172 From Modernism to Postmodernism

subject to entropy, art is for Barth a counter influence, an open


system where absorption and delivery of energy operate in a
circulating process of exhaustion and replenishment: “Entropy may
be where it’s all headed [i.e., death], but it isn’t where it
[dramaturgy] is; dramaturgy [i.e., narrative, story, plot ...] is
negentropic” (Let 768). Norbert Wiener, in his book The Human Use
of Human Beings, applies the law of entropy to the theory of
information, claiming that it is possible to treat sets of messages as
entropic-like sets of states of the external world. His book, laying
down the foundations of cybernetics, became, in Tony Tanner’s
words, “something of a modern American classic and may well have
been read by many of the [contemporary] writers” (1971, 144). It is
therefore no surprise that in Gaddis’s JR the writer, Jack Gibbs in his
frustration about disorder and waste cries out: “[R]ead Wiener on
communication, more complicated the message more God damned
chance for errors” (403).
Hassan is right in calling Nietzsche the “key to any reflection
on postmodern discourse” (1987, 444). Yet, Nietzsche, the
“philosopher of flow” (Gass 1996, 132), is a special case in that there
are at least two Nietzsches, one considered paradigmatically modern,
the other a prefiguration of postmodernism. And yet, though his
influence on postmodern ideas — directly and indirectly — is
overwhelming, his foundational importance is not or only uneasily
and obliquely acknowledged in the ongoing discussion of
postmodernism (see Babich). Nietzsche initiated the attack on the
bourgeois humanistic tradition and was the mentor of the radical
process of decentering thought; he was first and foremost in laying
the groundwork for the deconstructive tendencies of both philosophy
(Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida) and literature in the twentieth century.
He challenged Western rationality, its dualistic foundations, its belief
in the possibility of universal and univocal truth; he prepared the
“new way to a ‘Yes,’” and set up the field of force for the
postmodern “free play” (Derrida) in the void of absence. For him,
“the ‘subject’ is only a fiction”, and reality constitutes itself not as
“facts” but as “interpretations” (Nietzsche Will 1968, 199, 267).
Indeed, knowledge should stop “courageously at the surface”, and
“adore appearance” (Nietzsche, The Gay Science; qtd. in Gass 1996,
134). It “has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings. —
‘Perspectivism.’” It is restricted by “the constraint of language”
Philosophy and Postmodern American Fiction 173

(Nietzsche Will 1968, 267, 283). Federman follows suit and


demands, as many postmodern writers do, that all forms of duality
(since they rigorously impose form on force) should be negated —
“especially duality: that double-headed monster which, for centuries
now, has subjected us to a system of values, an ethical and aesthetical
system based on the principles of good and bad, true and false,
beautiful and ugly” (1975, 8).
Postmodern writers reject the binary mechanisms of
exclusion as arrogant, even “terroristic”, and suspend the rigorous
moral antitheses in an attempt to expand the force of experience and
transform aesthetic form. It sounds a bit like Nietzsche (and,
following him, Heidegger, Adorno, Derrida) when in Pynchon’s V. it
is said that “we do sell our souls: paying them away to history” for
the doubtful advantage to attain form, to receive “the fiction of
continuity, the fiction of cause and effect, the fiction of humanized
history endowed with ‘reason’” (286). Though it is not necessary to
assume a direct influence of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872)
on Gravity’s Rainbow (see Leont), it is obvious that Nietzsche’s
rejection of traditional oppositions and cause-and-effect thinking in
favor of the flow and forceful unity of life reappears in Gravity’s
Rainbow, now turned into the opposition of two characters. The
simplistic thought of the Pavlovian scientist Pointsman — who
believes in the unlimited power of science, strives toward
“mechanical explanation” for all phenomena, and holds that there is
“[n]o effect without cause, and a clear train of linkages” (GR 89) —
stands for the System, for the oppressive “Them”. Roger Mexico
formulates the counter-position, namely the “‘feeling [...] that cause-
and-effect may have been taken as far as it will go [...] The next great
breakthrough may come when we have the courage to junk cause-
and-effect entirely, and strike off at some other angle.’ ‘No — not
‘strike off’. Regress. [...] There are no ‘other angles’” (GR 89) — an
attitude representative of the alternative belief in life, nature, and
love. And it is not by chance that this Rationality-Life antithesis
equates with the antithesis, in Foucault’s terms, of Power (the
System, “They”) and resistance (Mexico, Slothrop). This is a vital
opposition that turns static dualities into the narrative dynamics of
the book.36 Finally Nietzsche is also the reference for the multiplicity
of languages and the problem of communication and the void.
Federman cites Nietzsche as one of his mottos in Take It or Leave It:
174 From Modernism to Postmodernism

“There are many more languages than one imagines. And man
reveals himself much more often than he wishes. So many things that
speak! But there are always so few listeners, so that man, so to speak,
only chatters in a void when he engages in confessions. He wastes
his truths just as the sun wastes its light. Isn’t it too bad that the void
has no ears?”
Of course, Nietzsche was not the only one to challenge the
cognitive ideal of universal truth and to propose the knowing activity
of particularity, heterogeneity, and plurality of perspectives and
values, as well as the process-nature of consciousness, and the
constructedness and provisionality of the categories of thought. In
less radical terms, yet still comparable to Nietzsche’s “per-
spectivism”, William James grounded his “pragmatism” in the
pluralistic view “of a world of additive constitution” (1955, 112), and
he coined the germane phrase “stream of consciousness” to designate
the dynamics, the interminable flow, the continuum of the mind in
contrast to the supposed fixities and results of its activities. Similarly,
Husserl understood “being as consciousness”, as consciousness that
operates intentionally, that not only relates to but constitutes the
objects in our experience. Heidegger rejected, just as Nietzsche did
before him, both “Cartesian subject-centered consciousness-centered
philosophy” (Palmer 1967, 74), as well as science and technology
that function as the modern form of “metaphysics”. Motivated by
what he considered two thousand years of decadence, beginning with
metaphysical thought separating entities from Being, he went beyond
traditional self-centered humanism in a post-subjectivist quest. The
priority of the life force in Nietzsche is comparable, though not
identical, to Heidegger’s “call of being”, which requires as response
not the self-assertion of the “will-to power” but an attitude of
receptivity (“Gelassenheit”) to the process of pre-articulated under-
standing which is the basic mode of existing prior to interpretation,
which in turn is prior to the “derivative” mode of specific assertion.
The later Heidegger in his lifelong quest for the meaning of Being
focused his thought on language as “naming”, which “brings the
thing to word and appearance for the first time” (1971, 56); language
figurates in poetry — by transgressing the inauthentic “Gerede”, the
meaningless speech of everyday existence — as the “house of
being”, the site where being is evented.
Philosophy and Postmodern American Fiction 175

Beyond the fact that Heidegger is probably the most


influential philosopher of the twentieth century, his paradoxical
absence-presence, said-unsaid figurations possessed, potentially at
least, great suggestiveness for the later thinkers and experimental
writers. (We remember the Heideggerian interpretation of post-
modern art by Spanos and others in the Sixties). Since his ideas were
part of the intellectual climate, were taken up and transformed by the
poststructuralists, thus were transmitted in different ways, they could
exercise their stimulating force even when no direct influence was
evident. Heidegger’s existentialist notions had their effect in spite of
the fact that they have a “depth” dimension, the notion of Being,
which is hidden and being disclosed at the same time in what is
“there”, the “Dasein”. The absence-presence opposition, which is
related or relatable to the force-form paradigm, leaves space for the
“inexplicable and unfathomable” (Heidegger), the mystery of life,
and could be interpreted in quite different and reductive, also non-
Heideggerian and non-essentialistic, constructivist and language-
centered ways. Though it has always been salient in philosophy and
theology, the antithesis absence-presence (now radicalized to become
an epistemological and ontological paradox), together with the force-
form opposition, became the basic matrix for postmodern strategies
of deconstruction and reconstruction, with or without a nostalgic
longing for the old answers to the pressing questions of meaning.
Beckett already offers many examples in Waiting for Godot, his
“trilogy” Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, and his later works.
Hamm in the Endgame reacts to the absence of values with the
outburst: “Ah the old questions, the old answers, there’s nothing like
them!”(29) The absence-presence figuration is strengthened in its
importance by the fact that it also marks the world-language
problem. Ludwig Wittgenstein, the most important initiator of the
language-oriented theories of the twentieth century (about whom
more will be said later), radicalized the language-reality problem that
Nietzsche and Saussure had earlier approached, by separating the
image of reality from reality itself; he thus problematized the
representational dimension of language, its semantic value, and
relativized meaning. His defining the “real” as mere “image” or
proposition, in what he later came to call “language games”, again
poses the absence-presence opposition.
176 From Modernism to Postmodernism

Such ideas prepare the way — just like the relativity and
indeterminacy concepts of the natural sciences — for the
strengthening of the force factor at the cost of form, for resistance to
conceptional meaning and to the rational categories of thought, and
for the encouragement of movement in thinking and of the unthought
within the thought and the regard for the language-orientation of
thought. They initiate the acceptance or at least negotiation of
indefiniteness and uncertainty, of plurality of viewpoints and modal
logic, furthermore the belief in the inseparability of reality and
fiction, in the creativity of possibility thinking (in the face of the
void), and in the superiority of the mobility of possible worlds over
the staticity of actual ones. Having accepted the constructedness, the
“as-if” character of all mental concepts and images, postmodern
writers gained a new freedom in relating to philosophic notions.
They could now regard historical thought as a viable, vital and
recontextualizable, though fictitious, frame of reference and use it for
meta-fictional purposes. It appears that the whole history of
philosophy, from Zeno, Heraclitus, Plato, and Aristotle to the
poststructuralists — just like the history of literature and art — had
opened up into an infinite field of possibility thinking, of allusive
intertextuality, which made it possible, even advantageous, to include
references in one’s text (argumentatively, paradoxically, ironically)
to the past.
Not only the paradoxical absence-presence figuration, but
also the paradox quite generally resides at the base of postmodern
deconstructive/ reconstructive thought and narrative strategy. Gass in
The Tunnel, for instance, gives numbers to his paradoxes: “BEING.
Holy word. Being cannot be recognized unless it succeeds in
Seeming. So Georgias asserted. Yet Seeming itself, will be weak and
ineffective unless it succeeds in Being. Paradox # 75” (75). This
predilection for paradox in postmodern fiction leads the writers back
to the famous paradoxes of the pre-Socratic thinkers, of Heraclitus,
Zeno of Elea, and Eubulides of Milet. They adapt them to their own
purposes (see Broich). Zeno’s famous paradox of motion, the eternal
race between Achilles and the turtle, which Achilles can never win,
serves to underline in Borges’s stories a new aesthetic method of
deconstruction and reconstruction that destabilizes rational-logical
thinking. Borges reverses the function of the Achilles/Tortoise para-
dox which in Zeno was to prove that there is no motion, that swift
Philosophy and Postmodern American Fiction 177

Achilles, in Barth’s words, “can never catch the tortoise, [...] for in
whatever short time required to close half the hundred yards between
them, the sluggish animal will have moved perhaps a few inches; and
in the very short time required to halve that remaining distance, an
inch or two et cetera — ad infinitum, inasmuch as finite distances,
however small, can be halved forever” (Barth, OwS 26). While Zeno
used the paradox to make a statement about the nature of being,
Borges suggests through it a skepsis towards logic and rational
understanding. Borges has not only written two articles about this
paradox, but moreover refers to it directly in three stories and makes
the paradox, as an anti-logic figuration, quite systematically his
narrative strategy, on all levels of the text. He translates the regressus
ad infinitum, which is the core of the Achilles/Tortoise paradox, from
philosophical logic into narrative structure (see also Blüher), thus
furnishing a model that would have an immense influence on
postmodern writers. In Gass’s The Tunnel, Kohler, referring to his
discovery as a child of his aunt’s intricate arrangement of boxes,
turns to Zeno’s paradox: “so that out of one box a million more
might multiply, confirming Zeno’s view, although at that age, with
an unfurnished mind, I couldn’t have known his paradoxes let alone
have been able to describe one with any succinctness. What I had
discovered was that every space contains more space than the space
it contains” (600). In Gaddis’s The Recognitions, Gwyard, the artist,
despairing of being an artist and instead counterfeiting the art of
Flemish painters, says to Valentine the corrupt critic:

But didn’t you hear them? racing? Tick. Tick-tick. Zeno wouldn’t have,
Zeno ... what I mean is add one, subtract anything or add anything to infinity
and it doesn’t make any difference. Did you hear? how they were chopping
time up into fragments with their race to get through it? Otherwise it
wouldn’t matter. But Christ! racing, the question really is homo — or homoi
-, who’s who, what I mean is, who wins? Christ or the tortoise? If God’s
watching, ... Christ! listen (Rec 408).

He notes at another occasion: “Good God, today I dishonored death


for ten thousand dollars. I’ll die like Zeno because he fell and broke a
finger coming out of school” (Rec 401, see also 420).
In his novel Mason and Dixon, Pynchon even uses Zeno’s
paradox to give shape to the colonization process in America, the
irresistible westward movement of the Surveyors, which makes all
attempts to stop them fail. Pynchon writes about the relationship
178 From Modernism to Postmodernism

between reality and story in a kind of vision, an alternative open


ending added to the actual one:

Suppose that Mason and Dixon and their Line cross Ohio after all, and
continue West by the customary ten-minute increments, — each
installment of the Story finding the Party advanc’d into yet another set of
lives, another Difficulty to be resolv’d before it can move on again.
Behind, in pursuit, his arrangements undone, pride wounded, comes Sir
William Johnson, play’d as a Lunatick Irishman, riding with a cadre of
close Indian Friends, — somehow, as if enacting a discarded draft of
Zeno’s Paradox, never quite successful in attacking even the rearmost of
the Party’s stragglers, who remain ever just out of range. Yet at any time,
we are led to believe, the Pursuers may catch up, and compel the
Surveyors to return behind the Warrior Path (706).

Most importantly, as already mentioned, Barth uses both the


Achilles/Tortoise paradox and Zeno’s Seventh paradox to
demonstrate the inexhaustibility of the story: “There are narrative
possibilities still unforeclosed. If our lives are stories, and if this
story is three-fourths told, it is not yet four-fifths told; if four-fifths,
not yet five-sixths, et cetera, et cetera” (OwS 30). Zeno’s Seventh
Paradox, speaking of the relationship between movement and rest, is
referred to in the following terms: “If an arrow in flight can be said to
traverse every point in its path from bow to target, Zeno teases, and if
at any given moment it can be said to be at and only at some one of
those points, then it must be at rest for the moment it’s there
(otherwise it’s not ‘there’); therefore it’s at rest at every moment of
its flight, and its apparent motion is illusory” (OwS 84-85). In the
story therefore, “[t]o the extent that anything is where it is [...] it has
no momentum. To the extent that it moves, it isn’t ‘where it is.’
Likewise made-up characters in made-up stories; likewise ourselves
in the more-or-less made-up stories of our lives” (OwS 86, Barth’s
emphasis).
Uncertainty, relativity, and multiplicity being the catchwords
in postmodern fiction, the Heraclitian paradox also makes sense —
that we enter and don’t enter the same river, that we are and are not
(which, contrary to Zeno’s Achilles/Tortoise paradox, was meant to
prove the identity of being and motion). In Barth’s The Sot-Weed
Factor it underlies the structure of the whole novel, which thematizes
the impossibility of attaining the one indubitable truth and a true,
integrated, unchangeable identity. Burlingame explains to the
Philosophy and Postmodern American Fiction 179

protagonist, his former pupil Ebenezer Cooke, when he meets him


again after an interval of absence, why he has changed his name,
appearance, and manner of speech: “The world can alter a man
entirely, Eben, or he can alter himself, down to his very essence [...]
a man [...] is a river running seawards, that is ne’er the same from
hour to hour [...] how is’t we speak of objects if not that our coarse
vision fails to note their change? The world’s indeed a flux, as
Heraclitus declared: the very universe is naught but change and
motion” (SWF 140); and Ebenezer must finally admit: “I know of
naught immutable and sure!” (143) Barth just like Borges elaborates
on and radicalizes the skeptical implications that are inherent in the
pre-Socratic paradoxes, thereby recontextualizing their meaning.
Finally, Federman contextualizes his text by making use of
Eubulides’s liar-paradox — Eubulides cites Epimedes who, himself a
Cretan, says: All Cretans are liars — to explain the concept and
method of the New Fiction: “The new fiction points to its own
fictionality — it calls its people what they are: Word-Beings. It calls
itself a book. The radical irony here (paradox) is the same as the old
statement of Zeno [whom he confuses with Epimedes] who affirms
that all Cretans are liars, but who also points out that he is a Cretan,
thus cancelling both the truth and the lie of his perfect rhetorical
statement” (1984, 142). It is obvious that, though world and language
are thought to be paradoxical and cannot be integrated in terms of a
Truth, this paradoxical state of affairs causes no longer much pain (as
it does in Kafka). Suffering, it appears, has given way to a joyful
acceptance of, and play with, unending paradoxical possibilities of
creating worlds and rewriting truth. But then there is Federman, who,
though he rejects truth but writes about it, suggests that one should
play with these paradoxical possibilities “according to the rules of the
fiction”, which make us encounter “the truth of fiction”, “the truth of
a work of art” — quite an amazing statement about the purpose of art
by an author who a few lines before said that “the new fiction will
not attempt to be meaningful, truthful, or realistic” (1984 142). For
the New Fiction the old truth is not the “real” or “pure” truth and has
to be replaced by a new (paradoxical) truth. The demand for a new
truth in fiction is, of course, not so new. One can encounter similar
claims as early as in the Romantic period, and Ezra Pound’s famous
dictum “Make it new!” was a tenet of Modernism.
180 From Modernism to Postmodernism

As mentioned above, intertextuality is a key-word for


postmodern fiction. The history of thought and its thinkers offers
almost all postmodern writers the opportunity to place themselves, in
spite of shifting signifiers and fluid worlds, in an intertextual network
of positions without losing the transformational and
recontextualizing energy. William Gaddis has one of his writers, Jack
Gibbs in JR, refer to Empedocles’s cosmology of strife between
order and chaos — he speaks of “one of the pre-Socratics, and the
rule of love and the rule of strife in the cosmic cycle of Emp” (48) —
implying that it is the phase of chaos that reigns in the present. In
Gaddis’s The Recognitions, the corrupt critic Valentine compares his
own time negatively with “the Athens of Socrates [...] the most
civilized thing that has ever happened on earth” (414). The narrator
in Gass’s “Mrs. Mean”, from In the Heart of the Heart of the
Country and Other Stories, has “chosen to be idle [...] to surround
[himself] with scenes and pictures; [...] to rest [his] life upon a web
of theory” (107). Having “succeeded to the idleness of God” (HHC
113), prying on and manipulating other people in order to realize his
imaginative projections, he puts himself in the context of ancient
Greek philosophers, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, etc. In the
epigraph of The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry
Waugh, Prop., Coover quotes playfully from Kant’s Critique of
Judgment: “It is here not at all requisite to prove that such an
intellectus archetypus [God] is possible, but only that we are led to
the Idea of it”, suggesting that ideas like “meaning”, “identity”,
“God” are only made-up, albeit necessary, human concepts. In The
Public Burning, Coover presents a newspaper, The New York Times,
as “The Spirit of History”, thus parodying Hegel’s central idea.
Martin Halpin, character and narrator in Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew,
notes playfully: “I suddenly understood Kant’s description of the
mind as a ‘whatnot’” (233); he also refers to Spinoza, Emerson,
Marx, Freud, Wittgenstein, etc. (228, 233, 235, 243, 245, 255). Gass
calls himself a Kantian in regard to the role of the imagination and of
order: “The whole investigation of the ground, as Kant would say, of
the imagination, the conditions of the imagination as such [...] leads
to (for me) a theory of fiction, and then finally to a theory of art in
general” (Ziegler and Bigsby 154). Barthelme in more or less detail
points to, quotes, discusses, or tacitly invokes Pascal, Kierkegaard,
Philosophy and Postmodern American Fiction 181

Schlegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Buber, to


name only a few.37
In many cases the references to philosophers have more than
casual significance. As mentioned, Gass calls himself a Kantian. For
both Barth and Coover, Plato or Plato and Aristotle serve as frames
of reference for theoretical deliberation. Philosophical positions, just
like myths and aesthetic traditions, have by now (mostly) lost their
aspects of truth and historical context, become part of the available
intellectual material the authors play with, recontextualize,
deconstruct, and reconstruct according to their own aesthetic
purposes. But this should not detract from the fact that they serve
also as veritable signposts in a time that has lost its own values and
turns back to history — because history is what we have on our back
anyway, to paraphrase Barth. In Barth’s LETTERS Jerome Bray’s
computer-constructed NOVEL that develops through a radical
reduction process into NOTES and then into NUMBERS,
constituting in the process a new genre, “enumerative”, is the futile
and ridiculous attempt to establish the “absolute type”, the “Platonic
Form” (32). Barth says in an interview:

I’m sure LETTERS doesn’t so much aspire to as stumble towards it. It’s
certainly not ‘the Platonic Form expressed,’ but it certainly participates in
the Platonic idea that Bray is speaking of. [...] Bray’s serious role in the
novel is to be a kind of mad, limiting case of preoccupations which are
also my preoccupations. The difference is that Bray takes them dead
seriously. [...] No novel made out of mere words, mere language, could
ever arrive at Bray’s notions of formal perfection and purity. [...] At the
end of LETTERS, you are holding in your hand not the novel that Jerome
Bray aspires to compose, not the mad limiting case or the pure form, but
something that has [one should add, playfully, comically] fallen from
Plato, although it participates in Bray’s idea” (Ziegler and Bigsby 34-35).

Coover, in one of the most striking cases of an author placing


himself and his own artistic aims in a field of philosophical ideas,
locates the new fiction between the poles of Plato and Aristotle. He
explains in an interview that with Cervantes

here was a shift from a Platonic notion of the world — the sense of the
microcosm as an imitation of the macrocosm and that there was indeed a
perfect order of which we could perceive only an imperfect illusion —
towards an Aristotelian attitude which, instead of attempting a grand
comprehensive view of the whole, looked at each particular subject matter
182 From Modernism to Postmodernism

and asked what was true about it. This was a widespread development of
tremendous importance (Gado 143).

Following Coover’s train of thought, the interviewer remarks that


“Aristotelianism is basically teleological and [...] is biased toward a
common sense acceptance of reality; in contrast, Platonism leads us
to distrust our senses and to retreat from tactile experience into a
cerebral, epiphenomenal universe”, and goes on to ask: “Isn’t the
new fiction, in its delight with abstracting experience, moving in a
Platonic direction?” Coover’s answer is clear-cut but also interesting
in its reservations:

No. We are turning back to design — I agree with you on that — and there
is an attraction toward modes of inquiry and creation that we rejected as
we moved into this Era of Enlightenment. Those forms we associate with
Platonism have a certain beauty, and now a potential of irony exists in
them. But because we don’t believe in a Godhead any more and the sense
of a purposeful unity has vanished, a true Platonist would say we are using
these things sophistically. The abstractions are empty, aren’t they ? Even
so, they are useful. It is easier for me to express the ironies of our
condition by the manipulation of Platonic forms than by imitation of the
Aristotelian (Gado 143-44).

The references to the philosophers (except perhaps to the


pre- Socratic thinkers) are double-edged. They serve to
relativize/satirize / comicalize both the narrative situation they are
placed in (together with the characters) and the philosophers referred
to in a game of mutual ironization. A model case is Gass’s “Cartesian
Sonata”, in which, the text of the dustjacket notes, Gass “redefines
Descartes’s philosophy. God is a writer in a constant state of fumble.
Mind is represented by a housewife who is a modern-day Cassandra.
And Matter is, what (and who) else but the helpless and confused
husband of mind”. And the whole connection of novellas, and Gass’s
and postmodern fiction in general, work on the premise that, as is
remarked in “The Master of the Second Revenge” again with a
playful note:

We must set aside, with the greatest respect, of course, Descartes’ overly
linear view of rational explanation, because revelations are rarely the result
of mind’s climbing a ladder, such clear and definitely placed rung
surmounted foot after foot after foothold like a fireman performing a
rescue; they are achieved more in the devious way cream rises to the top of
the container: everywhere the thin milk is sinking while simultaneously
Philosophy and Postmodern American Fiction 183

countless globules of fat are floating free and slipping upward each alone
and as independent of one another as Leibniz’s monads until gradually,
nearly unnoticed the globs form a mass which force the blue milk beneath,
whereupon the sweet cream crowns the carton, waiting to be skimmed
(198).

The extreme form of this ironization of philosophic


knowledge is the list of names (quoted below), which empties each
specific position by the others that surround it, by the fusion of order
and disorder, the juxtaposition of the “low” and the “high”, and by
the situation in which they are placed. It demonstrates the exuberance
of free creation or helplessness or both. Gass, Barth and Barthelme
are most extensive in the play with intertextual relations. Gass, who,
like Barthelme and Elkin, is a master of the list, refers in The Tunnel
to more than a hundred authors and provides listings of names like
the following:

a book is a holy vessel —ah, indeed, yes, it will transmogrify a turd.


Nordeau. Gentile. Husserl. Hartmann. Bentham. James and John Stewart
Mill. And of Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Schelling —how many? Outside I
hear the power mowers mow the snow. Of Herder, Heidegger, Heine,
Helmholtz, Spengler, Werfel, Weber? Open any. Karl Jaspers, Ernst
Jünger. A crack like a chasm. Vega. Natsume. Quevedo. The creaking
door in a horror story. Gorky. Heliodorus, Apollinaire: the most beautiful
names at all” (70).

In a self-reflexive monologue, Kohler considers possible reasons for


his inability to finish his book Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s
Germany:

Who thus constricts my chest? ... Confucius? that old chink? Livy then?
Gibbon? O la! Tacitus? Gilgamesh. How many times have I fallen inside a
sentence while running from a word? Winckelmann, Kafka, Kleist. You
would not believe that long bodiless climb from Descartes to Leibniz.
Lewis. Lemuel Gulliver. Catullus. Gogol. Constant. Sterne. I live on a
ledge — a sill — of type — a brink. Here. Pascal. Alone. Among the
silences inside my books ... Frege, Wittgenstein ... within the rhythms of
reason ... the withheld breath, the algebra of alliteration, the freedom of
design ... Dryden, Zeno, Stevens, Keats ... (Tun 96).

In The Recognitions, we have still the list, but Gaddis has the
narrator connect the philosophical discourse to a concrete situational
context. Mr. Pivner, a non-descript, practical person, who is sitting in
a hotel lobby reading Andrew Carnegie on making friends and
184 From Modernism to Postmodernism

“preparing to meet his son, to win him as a friend, and influence him
as a person” (530) (while the son, conversely, takes another person
for his father, with a number of comic consequences), is measured
against the wisdom of philosophers he actually has never read.
Among the philosophers referred to are Anaxagoras, Bacon,
Confucius, Democritus (three times), Descartes, Nietzsche, Schiller,
Schopenhauer, Socrates, the Stoics. The following passage is only an
excerpt from the scene but still may give an idea of what Gaddis does
in terms of comparison:

Pivner might never have read Democritus, the sire of materialism (judged
insane by his neighbors, true, those rare Abderites, who summoned
Hippocrates to cure him) [...] Had he read Democritus, he might have
discovered, in philosophy’s first collection of ethical precepts [...] that it is
the unexpected which occurs. [...] True, Mr Pivner might have read
Descartes; and, with tutelage, understood from that energetic fellow well
educated in Jesuit acrobatics (cogitans, ergo suming), that everything not
one’s self was an IT, and to be treated so. But Descartes, retiring from life
to settle down and prove his own existence, was as ephemeral as some
Roger Bacon settling down to construct geometrical proofs of God (Rec
530-31).

While Barthelme says about the function of his lists:


“Litanies, incantations, have a certain richness per se. They also
provide a stability in what is often a volatile environment, like an
almanac or a telephone book. And discoveries”, Gass comments the
lists in a different manner: “When I am playing with forms, it is often
simply to find a form for garbage. I love lists. They begin with no
form at all .... often anyway. A list of names is very challenging,
There is one right order and the problem is to find it” (LeClair and
McCaffery 43, 166). One might add that these lists not only develop
into an order but, conversely, also into a force of their own that
disrupts “regular” (spatial and situational) order and searches for a
more inclusive order (“chaos is an order” [Tun 452]). Barth speaks of
“the absolute chaos and anarchy of indiscrimination that threatens the
novel, that threatens all lists, catalogs, anatomies and the rest”
(Ziegler and Bigsby 37).
Philosophy and Postmodern American Fiction 185

4.3. De-Differentiation and Disjunction

In the third type of interrelation between philosophy and


literature, the disjunction between the two modes of discourse is
abolished in a de-differentiation or even fusion of the two. This
rejection of borderlines results from the belief that there are in fact no
clear-cut delimitations between philosophy and literature. Derrida’s
deconstructionist philosophy leads him to the conviction that
philosophy is itself a literary discourse, and that it distinguishes itself
from other discourses through rhetorical-literary strategies. In the
same vein, Gass notes, “[s]o much of philosophy is fiction. Dreams,
doubts, fears, ambitions, ecstasies [...] fiction, in the manner of its
making, is pure philosophy” (1970, 3). Ultimately, philosophy
flourishes only under an aesthetic perspective: “Pure philosophy
can’t [sustain its respective values], because objectively they have no
grounds; but within the novels, plays, and poems, they make sense
and are strangely, radiantly beautiful” (Ziegler and Bigsby 168). The
philosopher Odo Marquard thinks that it is necessary for philosophy
to relativize its seriousness with the comic mode. He contends that
“for philosophy, its own comedy is not only tolerable but vitally
necessary; it is the medium in which philosophy sustains those
questions for which it is competent” (150). The comic mode plays
itself out situationally, and that means only in literary discourse. In
literature the separation of theory and imaginary practice almost has
ceased to exist. Multiperspectivism is an answer to the new
uncertainty and indefiniteness. Literature interrogates its own status
as language and fiction, enquires into its own artificiality and the
artificiality of its borderlines. The problems of representation are
pushed to the fore. Representation includes the representation of the
theory of representation, in what has been called “meta-fiction”. The
first use of this term is attributed to William Gass who tried to find a
substitute for the unsatisfactory, ideologically tainted term “anti-
[traditional] novel”: “Many of the so-called antinovels”, he writes,
“are really metafictions” (1970, 25). This doubleness is another
outflow of the postmodern radical paradox, since it reveals the
human mind — to quote Iser, who refers to Vaihinger’s “Philosophy
of ‘as-if’” — in its “duality: it appears equally to be both the source
and the yardstick of fictions. In historical terms, fiction has now
conquered consciousness, its worst enemy, by imposing its own
186 From Modernism to Postmodernism

doubling structure upon it”. And “[t]his duality also means that every
fiction must incorporate awareness of its own fictitiousness” (Gass
1996, 131; Vaihinger, Introduction and passim). Postmodern fiction
is indeed aware of this situation, and, in one way or another,
transposes its awareness into narrative strategies.
A philosopher like Vaihinger, and his “as-if” theory fit
exceptionally well the concepts of artistic self-consciousness in
postmodern fiction and can serve as a frame of reference for many
purposes. The “as-if” double-coding signifies the crucial
epistemological problem (reality-fiction); it defines the existential
relation between self and world (illusion-imagination-reality); and it
refers to the social environment and its (lack of) values (obvious in
the being-seeming contrast). There is a wide scope of possible
applications of perspectives and terms that shows the wide-ranging,
satire-including potential of the imaginary in postmodern fiction. The
“as-if” is the most pervasive basis of Barth’s metanarrative, his
strategies of make-believe. His fiction plays with the as-if of
American “newness”, or of (absolute) values, or of love (The
Floating Opera, “Dunyazadiad” in Chimera), or with the as-if of
having a rationalizable plot (The End of the Road, The Sot-Weed
Factor, LETTERS), or the as-if of being a character (The End of the
Road, The Sot-Weed Factor). The narrator faces the possibility that
his storytelling is an as-if storytelling (“Menelaiad” in Lost in the
Funhouse), and even the author has to cope with the problem of
being an as-if author (Giles Goat-Boy, Chimera, LETTERS). Barth’s
comic mode, too, is an as-if comic mode; it represents the comic
response “as-if” it were possible and pertinent in full view of all the
fearsome facts of life and the ultimate void. In terms of the self, “as-
if” thinking may lead to “paralyzing self-consciousness” but also can
turn into “productive self-awareness” (Let 652). In “Anonymiad”, the
“as-if” attitude enables the minstrel, who is marooned on an
uninhabited island, to survive. He speaks of the power of the
imagination and, in addition, articulates the poetological concept
crucial for Barth and postmodern fiction: “I found that by pretending
that things had happened which in fact had not ... I could achieve a
lovely truth ... Menelaus, Helen, the Trojan War. It was as if there
were this minstrel and this milkmaid, et cetera; one could I believe
draw a whole philosophy from that as if” (LF 186). It would be the
philosophy of Vaihinger’s “als ob”. Federman does not use the “as-
Philosophy and Postmodern American Fiction 187

if” construction in the way Barth does, but he is an adherent of the


conditional “If”: “the governing tense of my fiction is indeed the
conditional tense. The supposition implied in the opening sentence
already undermines the truth, the reality, the validity, the
permanence, and the totalization of what follows in the book. [...] My
fiction emerges out of that unfinished, unsettled conditional
statement [...] but one could extend that further for an analysis of
much of contemporary fiction. I read Márquez’s One Hundred Years
of Solitude as a novel written in the conditional, even though the
dominant tense in the book may not seem to be conditional” (LeClair
and McCaffery 128-29).
In addition to the epistemological and existential versions of
the “as-if”, its social/moral adaptation is pertinent. In Gaddis’s The
Recognitions, the reference to Vaihinger and his “als ob” theory
serves to characterize a typically imitative character and a
counterfeiting social environment. First, it characterizes Otto, an
untalented playwright and would-be intellectual, who mechanically
repeats what he thinks is significant in what he hears other people
say, and during a conversation tries to call attention to Vaihinger;
and, second, it serves to satirize and comicalize the empty, vain, and
conceited talk of a crowd of as-if intellectuals and artists. Otto,
attempting to attract attention, ironically tries to explain to the non-
attentive, self-interested quasi-intellectuals around him Vaihinger’s
notion “that we must assume postulates to be true which, if they were
true, would justify“ (Rec 565). He does not quite understand himself
what he is talking about, nor is he able to finish his sentence in the
medley of utterances, while Anselm, making fun of Otto (and
unintentionally of himself and the crowd), says to the woman
standing beside him: “Hannah, sit down, sit down in Otto’s place,
he’s delivering a lecture on Die Philosophie des Als Ob” (Rec 565,
see also 566). This is a typical example of how Gaddis and other
postmodern authors use intertextual references for multi-perspectival
purposes. Philosophical notions are used to characterize the basic
underlying, social, epistemological, and ontological conditions.
Philosophical concept and the condition of the world fuse.
The as-if can also be seen as the generator of metafiction. In
its self-referentiality, metafiction is a function that has existed more
or less openly throughout the history of the genre (see the intrusive
narrators in Fielding, Richardson, Dickens, etc.), but it becomes
188 From Modernism to Postmodernism

obvious and important as the form of self-questioning in modern


fiction. Self-consciousness is a distinguishing feature of literary
modernism, where the process of cognition generally proceeds via
the perceptions, associations, and reflections of the characters’
minds, i.e., is grounded in the consciousness of individuals. Yet
metafiction in modern (and more so in postmodern) fiction
designates more than the term “self-consciousness” suggests. It
includes fiction-upon-fiction, the intertextual mode of writing in so-
called “historiographic metafiction” (see Hutcheon 1988), the parody
of traditional narrative forms and especially in the postmodern
narrative meta-mode, the fantastic. Furthermore, though metafiction
concerns itself with the “reflexive awareness of the conditions of
meaning-construction”, it can be conscious or intuitive. It is best
defined as “a borderline discourse, [...] a kind of writing which
places itself on the border between fiction and criticism”, between
“discourse and its representation”, and which “takes that border as its
subject”, the border between the narrated situation and the reflection
on that situation, on its constructedness and its (lack of) making
sense. Far from initiating the end of the novel by dominating
narrative and even pushing it aside, metafiction as a double-coded,
borderline discourse has rather proved to be an origin of force, “a
primary source of energy” (M. Currie 1995, 15, 2, 15, 2),38 dividing
the metafictional function between fiction and criticism, or, rather,
fiction and philosophy (since criticism grounds in and makes use of
the latter). Metafiction creates the narrated and narrating situations
on an equal basis; the fiction constructs the narrated situation in order
to decompose and recompose it and often deconstructs with it the
autonomy of the narrator, who, with Borges or Barth, sometimes
does not know whether he is telling the story in his own name or he
is being told the story himself in his role as the teller and thus is only
an object in a possible regressus ad infinitum. What remains along
the line are as-ifs, the as-if of the status of the fictional world, of the
narrator, even of storytelling. All this is conceptualized in terms of
Vaihinger’s “als-ob” philosophy, which radicalizes Kant’s concept of
consciousness, which in turn explains why Kant is another reference
point for postmodern writers, especially for a writer/philosopher like
Gass.
Philosophy and Postmodern American Fiction 189

4.4. Mutual Subversion

There is yet a fourth kind of interrelation between narrative


writing and philosophical thought, one which is an outcome of the
third type (de-differentiation and disjunction) but which nevertheless
has its own distinctive characteristics in the playful, ironic, and
comic modes of the text’s self-representation. This viewpoint
involves the radicalization or rather generalization of the
deconstructive attitude. In the literary text, the de-differentiation and
fusion of philosophy and literature can in fact turn into an active,
mutually subversive rivalry between thought and narrative, carried
out in an overlay of reflection and imagination. This struggle for
domination occurs in spite of the fact that both reflection and
imagination, philosophy and fiction, being locked into language and
the infinitude of its combinatorial possibilities, work in a kind of
metafictional play towards a common end. By means of
fantastication, meta-narration, sur-fiction, auto-referentiality, and the
narrator’s self-dramatization, the philosophical and literary dis-
courses relativize, even abolish the truths and meanings that suggest
a reference beyond the text, an essence beneath the surface and the
closure of the system, also the aesthetic and philosophic systems. The
question then is, which is the winner, the deconstructive philo-
sophical attitude of negation or the creative ability of fictional
recreation? Can the two work together constructively, or do they
contend with each other deconstructively? Yet the consequences of
the joint venture of reflection and creation are by no means easy to
judge since the possibilities are endless. As Borges writes in
Labyrinths: “all possible outcomes occur” and “each one is the point
of departure for other forkings” (26).
Most subversive to all meaning-building intentions are the
constrictive language-theories used in the texts to counter and
dramatize creativity. Doubts of the transparency and controllability
of language impair the belief in storytelling, too, in its making sense.
The need to compose worlds with vacant signifiers without
transcendental signifieds, the impossibility of presenting the
unpresentable, the infiniteness of the labyrinths of fiction produce not
only joyful feelings of freedom and new beginnings but also create a
crisis in writing, desperate texts — in spite of the playful, ironic and
comic modes in which they may be rendered. In the words of
190 From Modernism to Postmodernism

Barthelme: “Why does language subvert me, subvert my seniority,


my medals, my oldness, whenever it gets a chance? What does
language have against me — me that has been good to it, respecting
its little peculiarities and nicilosities, for sixty years” (UP 135) — a
view that affirms the dominance of language over subject and author
and correlates with Heidegger’s notion “that language speaks” (1971,
191),39 and with Lacan’s statement “that here the subject is spoken
rather than speaking” (1977, 71). The language crisis and existential
pain enter here an unfamiliar symbiosis. To both language theory and
existentialism we turn next.

4.5. Two Basics of Postmodern Fiction: Language Theory and


Existentialism

One set of interrelated philosophical theories that has


become especially important for the postmodern novel is made up by
the language theories of Wittgenstein and the deconstructionists,
especially Derrida, all of whom affirm that language is the world.
The deconstructionists further epistemological relativism and
ontological uncertainty, propose the view that reality is only the
function of the discourse that articulates it, and blur the borderline
between reality and fiction. The other set of philosophies, which —
surprisingly — has weight with the postmodern novel, does not
correlate with the language theories, even clashing with them: the
theories of Existentialism. Yet the various forms of existentialist
thought have their own deconstructive functions by abrogating
philosophic systems of the kind Hegel creates, and they are
situationally oriented, aim at the present moment. Heidegger
furthermore interconnects theorems of existentialism and language
autonomy, and Beckett’s success at doing the same may be one
reason why he became an important influence on postmodern authors
like Barth, Federman, and a host of other writers. Both sets of
philosophies existed side by side in the first half of the century; they
are interrelated by the postmodern novelists and often made into one
supportive matrix of thought, which then is played with, ironized,
comicalized in multiple perspectives and given the form of paradox.
The existential view enters the figuration of sense when the joy of
liberation from the strictures of reality is rivaled, as it often is, by the
anguish about losing the real ground of existence, of failing to reach
Philosophy and Postmodern American Fiction 191

the world through language. Play becomes the mediating instance


between language autonomy, which allows the limitless games of the
imagination and the existentialist fear of having lost a substantialized
self and a code for relating to the world. The concept of play in
addition to language theory and existentialist thought connects
philosophy and literature and makes this relationship complex.

4.5.1. Wittgenstein, Language, and the Postmodern Novel

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-philosophicus (1922)


addresses the opacity and the limits of language, the inexpressibility
of semantics. It is concerned with language-reality relationships, with
what language can and cannot do. The book starts out with the
application of logic as the method of an a priori definition of the
relation between the proposition or rather the image, and its object in
reality. But since it is impossible in language to say what a particular
object essentially is because of the ineffability of the simple name-
object relations, it is impossible to say in language what its logical
form is; this holds true also for the logical form of a proposition,
since this form consists of the ineffable forms of simple objects. The
Tractatus, furthermore, separates the realms of the sayable and the
unsayable (only showable), and assigns to the realm of the merely
thinkable and to silence whatever plays a part in terms of values,
ethics, religion, and the “mystical”: they fall beyond the limits of
expression in language. The book in fact excludes the self from
language and thus from being known: “The subject does not belong
to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world” (5.632). Insisting that
language has no essence, that no separate meta-language can be
formulated that unifies its manifestations, that the signifiers of
language only refer to other signifiers, Wittgenstein in his later works
speaks of language as a “maze”, describable only as a combination of
open-ended and overlapping “language games”. They are defined
by their “use”, not by reality, and can be grouped together merely in
terms of their family resemblances, “a complicated network of
similarities overlapping and crisscrossing” (1958, no. 66). The totally
public character of language defines the rules of the language games,
a fact which does away with the need of a private subject to initiate
them, and actually excludes the possibility of private languages.
Giving no secure knowledge, the language games are based on a
192 From Modernism to Postmodernism

series of ultimately unsubstantial but necessary conjectures:


strategies of understanding. In spite of the fact that the principle of
causality is at best “a class name”, and induction a convenient
strategy, such strategies and names allow us to pass through life
without questioning reality. Since language has no essence, no
essence can be attributed to the world. Representation, which is not
the representation of the one “real” world but of possible worlds, is
an unending process of articulation. Definitions are “free” to serve
many purposes, and can be drawn up as occasion and intention
require. The truth of our statements belongs to our linguistic system
of reference, which is pre-constitutive of the world and its meaning.
The influence of Wittgenstein of course renders quite
different though comparable results in the texts of postmodern
writers. William Gass in fact studied under Wittgenstein as a
graduate at Cornell, writing his doctoral thesis on language theory.
He comments on this experience in his essay “A Memory of a
Master”, in Fiction and the Figures of Life (see also Gass’s “Carrots,
Noses, Snow, Rose, Roses” and “At Death’s Door: Wittgenstein”).
Together with the “sur-fictionists”, Federman and Sukenick, Gass is
perhaps the most extreme of postmodern American authors in
asserting the dominance of language over world, to the extent that
characters are named, in Federman’s terms, mere “word-beings”,
which of course they are — and yet are not. Federman argues in
terms of Wittgenstein’s separation of reality and image of reality
against the traditional novel and for contemporary fiction:
“Traditional realistic fiction does not make any distinction between
the real experience and the mental cinema. It confuses the real thing
with the illusion of the real thing. Or if you prefer, it makes the
illusory mental image pass for the real thing. Well for me, and for
most contemporary writers, the mental image is more interesting,
more important than the real thing” (LeClair and McCaffery 136).
Literature is the most expressive medium of language. Thus
all language-world problems are heightened in literary fiction.
Correlated with the problem of how to view the relationship between
signifier and signified is the question of whether language and
literature are tools of freedom or of necessity. There are two ways of
looking at literature and the relationship between “reality”, author,
language, text, and reader. On the one hand, literature can be
considered, in Roland Barthes’s pointed formulation (out of the spirit
Philosophy and Postmodern American Fiction 193

of the Sixties), as “the utopia of language”, i.e., the utopia of


freedom, since “there is no reconciliation within the present society”
(1970, 83-86). This would strengthen the hand of the author and his
or her freedom of choice. On the other hand, the power of language
to dominate and direct thought (because thought appears to be
impossible without language) is for the late Barthes “quite simply
fascist” (1982, 469). Thus the question poses itself, which is the
dominant, the human subject or the linguistic system? Does language
and literature open up a free space for the imagination, or does
subjectivism give way to a kind of deterministic intertextuality, a
linguistic “naturalism”, which might even be seen to mirror the
oppressive tendencies of the social power system (cf. Barth). And
there is a third way to respond to the problematic signifier-signified
relationship: complaint, despair at the impossibility to transcend
language, to reach “reality” and define truth. For postmodern fiction
this third, existentialist reaction to the “linguistic turn”, and the first,
exuberant one, are especially important.
Beckett is the author who in the separation of thing and name
and the separation of name and meaning finds occasion for endless
speculations but also existential pain. The metafictional or rather
meta-linguistic form of these reflections exerts great influence on
postmodern writers. Molloy notes, “there could be no things but
nameless things, no names but thingless names. [...] All I know is
what the words know, and the dead things” (Moll 31). Beckett
describes his worn-out fictions as giving “the expression that there is
nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from
which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together
with the obligation to express” (Beckett and Duthuit 18). This is in
some ways one of the starting points of postmodern fiction — except
that the new fiction leaves the existential trap, resigns the alienation-
and-despair theme, recognizes in the vacuum the chance to build new
worlds, and opens space for a wide variety of perspectives, play,
parody, irony, the comic mode, and an infinite range of
transformations, without canceling the existential view, which is
almost always there, at least as a horizon for the narrative process.
Pynchon is perhaps the most versatile of those authors who
exploit the text-world problem. Like Barth, though in a more
existentialist, modern way, he combines the language-world problem
with the existential problem of identity and the relationship between
194 From Modernism to Postmodernism

character and society to a perfect symbiosis. He uses the text-object


equation for local effects. Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow reads
raindrops as “giant asterisks [...] inviting him to look down at the
bottom of the text of the day, where footnotes will explain all” (204);
or Enzian thinks of himself and his Herero people as the “scholar-
magicians of the Zone, with somewhere in it a Text, to be picked to
pieces, annotated, explicated, and masturbated till it’s all squeezed
limp of its last drop” (GR 520). But Pynchon goes far beyond this
inconsequential play with ideas. In V. the letter V. is the sign for the
Lady V., a character, the search for whom, for “what she is” (43), is
the protagonist’s existential task and failure. V. is a signifier without
a transcendental signified, or rather with such a multiplicity of
signifieds that they are “Nothing but proper nouns” (40), that “the
word is in [...] fact, meaningless, based as it is on the false assump-
tion that identity is single, soul continuous” (287). V. is meaningful
only as an object and the object is the blank space of Stencil’s quest
that allows him to interpret (the absence/emptiness of) his goal with
multiple stories without facing the danger of an end which would be
finite, death. With Pynchon, the language-world and sign-meaning
problems become the pattern on which all versions of the absence-
presence problem, those of existence and meaning, can be grafted (or
vice versa). Paranoia in his novels can thus be understood as both the
filling of empty spaces in the signifiers and the resistance against the
transcendental signified, the “System” of Authorities, which,
although he is subjected to and exploited by it, comes near, however,
to being an empty signified, a vacancy, which can be interpreted
endlessly —an infinite circular movement of the mind within a
closed/open sphere of signifiers. In Gravity’s Rainbow, the signified
that Slothrop turns against is the “They”- system that represses the
freedom of the individual but, because of its complexity and instable
(fictional) reality status, does not step forward to reach the status of a
clearly recognizable enemy.
Barth uses the “weakness” of language, the impossibility to
reach through and beyond the text to whatever might be called
“reality”, to dramatize, for instance in “Title” and “Anonymiad”
(Lost in the Funhouse), the problems facing the artist. The
writer/protagonist has both an artistic and existential problem, arising
from his being able only to write “as if” he could transcend language.
The “as if” is productive but not enough. By failing to constitute
Philosophy and Postmodern American Fiction 195

himself as an artist the protagonist fails to constitute himself also as a


person. In “Menelaiad”, Menelaus, failing to transcend language and
story in his attempt to understand love and identity, regresses into
language, into storytelling, into the voice that tells his story or rather
the seven cloaks of story that surround and blur his existence. Barth
furthermore relates to Wittgenstein’s remark that values cannot be
expressed in language and belong to the region of silence. He
respects (playfully) the weakness of language, as in, when in
“Menelaiad” (Lost in the Funhouse), he marks the term love with
seven sets of quotation marks (“ ‘ “ ‘ “ ‘ “ love “ ‘ “ ‘ “ ‘ “), and
designates the answer of the Delphi oracle to Menelaus’s identity
question with a blank in the text. A blank also marks the word
“death” in LETTERS. As all postmodern writers, Barth in his texts
metafictionally asserts his theoretical positions. As already
mentioned, Jacob Horner in The End of the Road makes articulation,
and that is also narration, his only remaining, albeit also questionable
absolute (and turns his statement into a parody of Beckett’s play with
thesis and anti-thesis):

Articulation! There, by Joe, was my absolute, if I could be said to have one


[...] To turn experience into speech —that is, to classify, to conceptualize,
to categorize, to conceptualize, to grammarize, to syntactify it —is always
a betrayal of experience, a falsification of it; but only so betrayed can it be
dealt with at all, and only in so dealing with it did I ever feel a man, alive
and kicking. It is therefore that, when I had cause to think about it at all, I
responded to this precise falsification, this adroit, careful myth-making,
with all the upsetting exhilaration of any artist at his work. When my
mythoplastic razors were sharply honed, it was unparalleled sport to lay
about with them, to have at reality. [...] In other senses, of course, I don’t
believe this at all (ER 119).

Barthelme holds a position between complaint about and


affirmation of the fact that our sense-making is restricted to language
games. In his version of the “linguistic turn”, Barthelme centers his
playful gaze not only on people and worlds, but also on “universes of
discourse” (SW 44), a view that directs attention to the signifier, the
linguistic game in the text, also the inherent incongruity and
clichédness of language, and mutually exclusive linguistic fields and
discourses. In his narratives the attempt to establish transcendental
meaning is aborted because of the shift and tumbling of verbal
phrases, the lack of continuity and coherence. In Barthelme’s most
196 From Modernism to Postmodernism

extreme language experiment, the nine page piece “Sentence”,


consisting in fact of one sentence, he seems to refer to Wittgenstein
when he says at the end that the discovery of the limitations of all
human systems, and consequently also of language, has been “a
disappointment, to be sure, but it reminds us that the sentence itself is
a man-made object, not the one we wanted of course, but still a
construction of man, a structure to be treasured for its weakness, as
opposed to the strength of stones” (CL 114). This “weakness” leads
to Barthelme’s minimalistic imaginative constructs, his attenuation of
hard cores, i.e., theme, character, style, and the paring down of the
discourse to mere surfaces.
An example of the exuberant response to the liberation of
language from reality is Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in
America. He draws the logical conclusions from and playfully
exploits the signifier-signified problem and makes it the basis of his
novel. In a light-hearted, playful, and satiric spirit, he uses the title
phrase, not, as the reader might expect, to denote a pastoral idyll, but
to establish a playing field, a more free vehicle to “situationalize”,
fantasize, and pluralize the semantic content — thereby satirizing
two popular clichés: the unity and wholeness of nature, and America
as the New Eden that is close to nature. Since the word and the
linguistic phrase exist independent of reality, in fact are constructions
of the mind, one may freely and arbitrarily confer signifieds to
signifiers and make this process a creative principle in fiction. The
phrase “trout fishing in America” comes to mean simultaneously a
person, a place, a hotel, a cripple, a costume, a pen nib, a book, etc.
The logical end of these reversals of roles in the relationship
between subject and language is the self-subversion and self-
cancellation of author and text. Language so to speak obliterates the
exertions of the author to make sense, and the writer accepts this
result by surrendering narrative to randomness. In Federman’s novel
Take It Or Leave It, the text results from a discourse that operates
with four frames and establishes the verbal vacuum of a “story that
cancels itself as it goes”, working its way “toward unreadability,
toward free reading” (ch. 0, xx). What “free reading” means is
exemplified in the same book. Chance is here made most rigorously
and methodically the exclusive operating principle that negates the
traditional orders of sequence and cause and effect so that “all
Philosophy and Postmodern American Fiction 197

sections [...] are interchangeable”, and the unnumbered pages can be


read in any order one likes (“Summary of Recitation”).
Wittgenstein’s famous opening statement of the Tractatus,
“The world is all that is the case”, is especially attractive for
postmodern writers. It marks both the world-text problem and the
futility of the human endeavor of reaching one all-encompassing
meta-truth, and thus includes what Nietzsche called “perspectivism”,
though now on both an epistemological and ontological level. The
phrase becomes a kind of self-explanatory formula. It marks the
change of attitude from the modernists’ quest for knowledge and
attempt at ordering disorder in modernism to the postmodern
acceptance or at least facing of disorder and chaos as “ ground-
situation” (Barth). With chaos as their starting point, postmodern
writers have a salient alternative to the obsessive modern search for
transcendent meaning, and ultimately a chance to do new work, to
open the world to the creative and liberating play of the imagination.
That Wittgenstein’s seminal statement is used for programmatic
purposes in postmodern fiction is demonstrated in Max Apple’s short
narrative text “Post-Modernism”, from Free Agents (1984). It
includes “a bit of analysis” and ends with: “Everything is the way it
is” (137, 139). In Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc.,
J. Henry Waugh, Prop., a final harmony is established by the
realization that the Baseball game (just like the game of life) is “not a
trial”, nor “a lesson”, but “just what is” (242). A passage in Gass’s
The Tunnel deals ironically with the subject of facts that are and
employs clashing perspectives:

There are facts, but we don’t know them. Nah ... you don’t say?
what a pity!
Ah ... then they know us.
Hearing the news, Planmantee’s bottle-bottomed eyeglasses
would grow moist with emotion, ready to ring everything in his sight. “Die
Welt ist Alles”, he would reverentially sigh, “was der Fall ist” (416).

Pynchon employs Wittgenstein’s phrase in V. as an ironic


warning against the hunt for “reality”, “depth”, “connections”
beyond the surface (of language). A German officer, Weissmann,
thinks he has broken the code of a spy, Mondaugen. The message
that he comes up with is “Kurt Mondaugen” in anagram and
Wittgenstein’s opening statement in German: “DIEWELTIST-
198 From Modernism to Postmodernism

ALLESWASDERFALLIST”. This provokes Mondaugen’s biting


comment, “The world is all that the case is [...] I’ve heard that
somewhere before” (V. 258-59). The bizarre coincidence mocks both
Weissmann’s paranoia and the reader’s and critic’s desire to make
connections,40 and it supplies an implicit warning against all attempts
at totalizing and synthesizing interpretation — one that Pynchon’s
critics have by no means heeded. In Barthelme’s collection of stories,
Amateurs, one of the characters, referring to the current exhaustion
and stereotypicality of all notions and discourses, paraphrases
Wittgenstein’s statement parodically and nostalgically: “The world is
everything that was formerly the case” (128). When Elkin says,
“everything is true, everything [...] I believe that everything is true”,
(Ziegler and Bigsby 101-102) this is not very different from
Wittgenstein’s “The world is all that is the case”. Finally, Eco’s
philosophical “thriller”, The Name of the Rose (1981), whose action
takes place in an Italian monastery in late Medieval times,
demonstrates how a whole book successfully builds its theme and
structure on the opposition of theological and philosophical
positions, including Wittgenstein’s, while it uses at the same time the
detective formula of popular fiction as an operator of spiritual
struggle. The typically postmodern metafictional device of double (or
multiple) coding is in fact used by the compositional principle of the
entire text (detective novel/novel of ideas), and regulates what Eco
calls the “disguised quotations from later authors (such as
Wittgenstein)”, which are set up “as quotations from the [Medieval]
period”.

4.5.2. Derrida and the “Dissemination” of Meaning

Derrida, in the tradition of Nietzsche, Husserl, and


Heidegger, deconstructs and demystifies metaphysics, undermines
the essence of language, attacks the logocentrism of structuralism,
reflects the ideas of philosophy as though in a distorting mirror, and
attempts to develop strategies for going to and extending the limits of
language. He finds in Saussure’s principle of differences “a generator
of semantic mazes in which words refer only to words, in an infinite
play of difference for which there can be no center” (Thiher 1984,
83). The signifieds that the signifiers articulate exist only as
difference and, by being different, contain the “trace” within them of
Philosophy and Postmodern American Fiction 199

the other signifieds, all of which are neither fully present nor absent
but create an infinite play of reference among signs. Meanings are
constantly deferred in time, in a process that Derrida calls
“différance” (in contrast to différence) or “dissemination”; they are
moved, “disseminated”, to other signs and their meanings, and
dismiss any attempt at restricting their possibilities. No system of
thought or authority can accommodate these possibilities. Indeed,
“[t]he absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and
the play of signification infinitely” (1988b, 110), i.e., also extends it
beyond the single text, thus preparing the ground for the intertextual
relationships that are so important for postmodern fiction. This
referring of one signifier or text to another connects Derrida with
Lacan and also Sartre (though not with his essentialism), so that
Federman can refer to both Derrida and Lacan in The Twofold
Vibration and choose a Sartre quote as epigraph for his Amer
Eldorado: “L’autre, en moi, fait mon langage qui est ma façon d’être
en l’autre”.
Yet there is a limit to Derrida’s deconstructive drive. He
argues that we cannot think beyond metaphysics and need ordering
notions like “center”, and that indeed transcendental concepts serve
as the ground of possibility for the linguistic systems that constitute
the world. These concepts that we require in order to relate to the
world but cannot delimit in their meaning he places “under erasure”,
erasing them by putting an “X” on them (an idea he borrows from
Heidegger). The dilemma of this double coding provides the
groundwork for the most fundamental paradox of postmodern fiction:
we continue to recognize and make use of what has been already
abolished but remains necessary. The erasure shows the distance
from the concept, while its further existence demonstrates the
necessity to keep it because there is no substitute. This double-coding
is crucial for postmodern fiction. The deconstructive drive, for
instance, deconstructs the idea of character by erasing the identity-
concept, and the notion of plot by eliminating the cause-and-effect
configuration, but still keeps intact their roles as figurations in the
distribution of fictional situations. These situations are constituted, in
spite of all deconstructive energies and the resulting fantastications,
by ideas of space, time, character, and action/event, even if these
elements are transformed or not concretized in detail.
200 From Modernism to Postmodernism

Derrida, together with Wittgenstein (and Saussure or


Nietzsche), comes to fill the creative stimulating role as “mentor” of
postmodern fiction. Derrida’s discussion of the meaning problem,
especially the concepts of difference and “différance”, the endless
deferral and “dissemination” of meaning, which create ever more
possibilities of signification, offers Pynchon the chance, especially in
V. and The Crying of Lot 49, to dramatize this deferral of meaning in
terms of plot structure by projecting dissemination into the existential
quest of the protagonist (for example, Stencil in V). As mentioned
above, he searches for the Lady V. who is a signifier without
identifiable signified. But she is more than that. By multiplying the
meaning of V. into the “V.-jigsaw” (44), into Virginia, Vheissu,
Valetta, Veronica, Vera, Venus, Vogelsang, vicious, venery, vectors,
etc., by sending her from place to place all over the world — “V. in
Spain, V. on Crete: V. crippled in Corfu” (364) — and in fact
suspecting her to be involved in a conspiracy and in world affairs,
even in “the ultimate Plot Which Has No Name” (210) — she
becomes a puzzle. On the one hand her whole being “did add up only
to the recurrence of an initial and a few dead objects” (419), but, on
the other, she creates further narrative potential. The riddle produces
suspense and motivation for the protagonist Stencil to solve it, and
the will to solve the riddle drives him on to his obsessive search,
though indeed “he didn’t know what sex V. might be, nor even what
genus and species” (210), and V. finally “was a remarkably scattered
concept” (364). By considering the possibility that she is only a
hallucination of Stencil’s mind, by denying her metamorphoses any
“continuity” and any “logic” (310) and Stencil’s quest any end, by
making her finally into an inanimate object consisting of replaceable
mechanical pieces that come apart, dismantling the “person” into a
heap of matter, Pynchon establishes, and at the same time defers and
“disseminates”, the decisive dualities that are the basis of all his
books and serve as material for deconstruction: the oppositions
between reality and fiction, intention and accident, conspiracy and
randomness, animate and inanimate, in short, meaning and non-
meaning. He thus creates progress and teleology, and then drowns
them in simultaneity and the excess of possibilities (see also Wills
and McHoul).
With regard to narration, Derrida generates two crucial ideas,
which correspond to and define intellectual trends of the Seventies
Philosophy and Postmodern American Fiction 201

and Eighties and, as suggested above, correlate with the tendencies of


postmodern American fiction, namely: that (1) in spite of the
decentering of discourses, centering and ordering concepts still abide,
though they appear “under erasure”, and that (2) the signified only
exists as difference and deferral. The first proposition, in connection
with Heidegger’s absence-presence configuration of Being, serves to
establish some kind of center or “depth”, which, however, remains
undefined or uncertain in its outlines, like Pynchon’s “System” or
Hawkes’s “terroristic universe”, and which, in existential terms,
finally becomes the void. The second axiom causes the infinite
transformations of the imaginary, the multiplication of every
narrative unit, the play with endless possibilities, and the pro-
liferation of endings.

4.6. Existentialism

As mentioned, William Spanos, one of the founders of the


influential boundary 2: a journal of postmodern literature and
culture, and an early promoter of postmodernism in the 1970s,
claimed that “the postmodern imagination [...] is an existential
imagination” (1972, 148). What he is implying is that the existential
imagination’s purpose is “to engage literature in an ontological
dialogue with the world on behalf of the recovery of the authentic
historicity of modern man” (166). With reference to Sartre, Beckett,
Ionesco, Genet, Frisch, and Pynchon, he speaks of a “postmodern
anti-literature of the absurd”, which demonstrates “the primordial
notat-home, where dread, as Kierkegaard and Heidegger and Sartre
and Tillich tell us, becomes not just the agency of despair but also
and simultaneously of hope, that is, of freedom and infinite
possibility” (Spanos 1972, 156). But the course of the 1970s gave
him little reason to hope for the development of an existentialist
postmodern literature as a counterforce to the “onto-theological”
Western tradition, a counterforce that he came to understand not only
in chronological but also in typological terms, so that for him
“postmodernism is not fundamentally a chronological event, but
rather a permanent mode of human understanding” (Spanos 1979,
107). By the end of the 1970s Charles Altieri who had first joined the
existentialist wave, saying that “God for the contemporaries
manifests himself as energy, as the intense expression of immanent
202 From Modernism to Postmodernism

power” (1973, 610), later reconsidered: “In post-modern writing


there is very little that allows any direct application to existential
situations except as ironic stances for negotiating a world so full of
signifiers it must be empty of beliefs” (1979, 98).41
The question of course is what are “ironic stances” and what
are their functions and purposes. The disruptive impulse of
postmodern fiction, following the deconstructionist turn, deconstructs
the individual subject necessary for an existentialist stance and defies
all univocal attitudes and monolithic modes by the multiplicity of
discourses, of allusions and comments, by redundancy and
inconsistency. The shifting orders and juxtaposed configurations of
the text, however, open up a “dialogic space” (Bertens) for various
and contradictory positions, a circumstance which allows us “to
reinstall and reinforce as much as undermine and subvert the
conventions and presuppositions it appears to challenge” (Hutcheon
1988, 1-2), including the existentialist views. The ironic stance
indeed needs the “dialogic space” and the play with heterogeneous
material in order to attain what Venturi calls “the difficult unity of
inclusion”, in contrast to the modernist “easy unity of exclusion”
(Complexity 16), and to provide for the double or multiple coding of
the text, superimposing a new meaning on an old one. Playing with
the old beliefs and attitudes means reconstructing them under
whatever viewpoint; and being reconstructed, they play their own
game and make themselves heard, if necessary even “under erasure”,
as presence in absence, as the void underlying all games of the
imagination. The utterances of postmodern authors themselves
demonstrate their contact with existentialism.
Postmodern writers were born and grew up in the climate of
existentialism. The emphasis on human resistance against a
meaningless universe made existentialism (and the absurd)
particularly attractive after World War II. It was the climate of
existentialism that shaped post-war art in general and the novels of
Bellow, Mailer, Malamud, Roth, or Updike, in particular, though
there were also clear signs of dissatisfaction with and dissolution of
this monolithically serious, existential basis of literature, which had
appeared to become exhausted. Saul Bellow, who wrote two
existentialist novels (Dangling Man [1944] and The Victim [1947]) at
the beginning of his career, later decided that if he had a choice
between complaint (about alienation) and comedy he would choose
Philosophy and Postmodern American Fiction 203

comedy and began what he called his “mental comedy” with The
Adventures of Augie March (1953). Yet the influence of
existentialism remained pervasive. Elkin says: “Like most people of
my generation, I fell in love with the philosophy of existentialism”
(LeClair and McCaffery 109). Gass teaches philosophy courses about
contemporary aesthetics and, among others, about “Heidegger,
Bachelard, Sartre, and so on” (174). Barth writes, “I had picked up
from the postwar Zeitgeist some sense of the French Existentialist
writers” (1995, 257). Barthelme admits to having become
“acquainted with [...] Husserl, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and
company” (LeClair and McCaffery 34-35), and he says in another
interview: “As to ‘deeper cultural sources,’ I have taken a certain
degree of nourishment (or stolen a lot) from the phenomenologists:
Sartre, Erwin Straus, etc”. (Bellamy 1974, 52). What he took from
them is probably the idea of anxiety. When in an interview he
qualifies his former statement that “the principle of collage is the
central principle of all art in the twentieth century”, he adds: “Maybe
I should have said that anxiety is the central principle of all art” (52).
But his view of Heidegger, quoted below, shows his reservations,
which then again are balanced by a sense of deficiency and nostalgia.
Hawkes, finally, says in an interview, after discussing Camus’s
influence on his Travesty, in a typically ambivalent statement: “But
now I think our discussion has left me a romantic existentialist,
which is surely an anachronism in this postmodern world of ours”
(Ziegler and Bigsby 181).
All concepts that imply wholeness, the notions of ego, of
identity, and authenticity, the idea of centeredness, Heidegger’s
concept of “Being”, are devaluated and played with in postmodern
fiction, but they are still present as an inevitable horizon of existence
against which the ironic imagination throws its darts. For Barth, such
a constellation of surface and (denied) depth takes on its concrete
form in the opposition of put-on mask and individual core. It serves
as the matrix of characterization inasmuch as the mask is quite
consciously and obviously set in contrast to the existentialist concept
of essence. This kind of antagonism between existentialist and
counter-existentialist positions defines Barth’s early novels and not
only them. In The Floating Opera, Todd Andrews tries to overcome
his supposed heart condition (which turns out to be a self-deception)
by creating a sort of philosophical system involving the adaptation of
204 From Modernism to Postmodernism

masks, those of the depraved, the holy, and the cynic, only to realize,
however, that “‘Nothing has intrinsic value’” (223). This does not
help much and is finally replaced by the perception that “in the real
absence of absolutes, values less than absolute mightn’t be regarded
as in no way inferior and even lived by” (FO 252). Such a solution,
teaching the abolishment of absolutes and the suspension of the
concern with death, in this book still avoids the clash between mask
and core, opening a way out of the predicament of life.
In The End of the Road, Barth radicalizes this opposition
between absoluteness and relativism by confronting the mask with
the ego in more closely existentialist terms. Jacob Horner, the
protagonist, suffers from an illness characterized by immobility and
paralysis of the will. A black doctor, “a kind of superpragmatist”,
(79) who is a specialist in the treatment of such an illness takes
Horner to his farm and introduces him to the art of “mythotherapy”.
The presuppositions of this “mythotherapy” are “that human
existence precedes essence, if either of the terms really signifies
anything; and that a man is free not only to choose his own essence
but to change it at will” (ER 82). Consequently the doctor advises
Horner to read Sartre but relativizes Sartre’s philosophy by taking his
position to the “end of the road”. He explains to Horner the necessity
of giving up the idea of a center. He should assign roles, or in the
doctor’s term, “masks”, to himself: “It’s extremely important that
you learn to assume these masks wholeheartedly. Don’t think there’s
anything behind them: ego means I, and I means ego, and the ego by
definition is a mask. Where there’s no ego — this is you on the
bench — there’s no I” (ER 84-85). But the doctor’s therapy fails
because Jacob’s ego won’t disappear. The catastrophe at the end,
Rennie’s death during the incompetent abortion of her child makes it
impossible for rational understanding and emotional response to
come together. The masks fall, or in the doctor’s words:
“Mythotherapy would have kept you out of any involvement, if
you’d practised it assiduously the whole time. [...] you’ve made
yourself a penitent when it’s too late to repent” (ER 172). Barth
parodies not only the notion of essence in the concept of character,
but also ironizes (and ponders on) the concept of Being in almost all
his books. An example of his ironization of existentialist concepts
occurs in a love scene in Giles Goat- Boy, where a boy, in order to
overcome a girl’s timidity and her half-hearted resistance, lectures
Philosophy and Postmodern American Fiction 205

her — in implied reference to Heidegger and existentialism — on


“Beism”: “you’ve got to be, chickie! Be! Be!” (34) Barth furthermore
told an interviewer with regard to Giles Goat- Boy: “I’m not sure that
synthesis is possible [Being and Self would be possible terms for
such a synthesis]. And I’m not terribly interested in it anyhow”
(Prince 57).
Barthelme is more direct in rejecting existentialist notions. In
Snow White we are told, “Jean Paul Sartre is a Fartre” (66), and
Snow White explains her poem, in terms of Sartre, as a means of “the
self armoring itself against the gaze of The Other” (59). The story
“Nothing: A Preliminary Account” from Guilty Pleasures (1963)
takes on Heidegger directly:

Quickly, quickly. Heidegger suggests that “Nothing nothings” — a calm,


sensible idea with which Sartre, among others, disagrees. (What Heidegger
thinks about nothing is not nothing.) Heidegger points us toward dread.
Having borrowed a cup of dread from Kierkegaard, he spills it and in the
spreading stain he finds (like a tea-leaf reader) Nothing. Original dread, for
Heidegger, is what intolerabilizes all of what-is, offering us a momentary
glimpse of what is not, finally a way of bumping into Being. But
Heidegger is far too grand for us; we applaud his daring but are ourselves
performing a homelier task, making a list. Our list can in principle never
be completed, even if we summon friends or armies to help out. [...] And
even if we were able, with much labor, to exhaust the possibilities, get it
all inscribed, name everything nothing is not, down to the last rogue atom,
the one that rolled behind the door, and had thoughtfully included
ourselves, the makers of the list, on the list — the list itself would remain.
Who’s got a match? (GP 164)

This text, as well as the famous passage from Barthelme’s


Snow White about the “trash phenomenon” that may well grow to
“soon reach a point where it’s 100 percent” (97), makes clear that,
instead of the vertical dimension of depth and essence, now the
horizontal one of completion comes to establish the utopian
dimension of language. Completion of “the list”, however, is never to
be achieved, since language has “[1] an ‘endless’ quality, and [2] a
‘sludge’ quality” (96), and meaning is infinitely disseminated or
deferred (Derrida). This concept is exemplified in Snow White, in
Gass’s The Tunnel, or in Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew by lists of
disparate material running over pages, demonstrating both the
incompatibility of the items of those lists and their “sludge” quality.
In all these cases no completion is possible, only an ersatz
206 From Modernism to Postmodernism

completion and an ersatz satisfaction. Indeed, for Barthelme, “‘sense’


is not to be obtained by reading between the lines (for there is
nothing there, in those white spaces) but by reading the lines
themselves [...] arriving at a feeling not of satisfaction exactly, that is
too much to expect, but of having read them, of having ‘completed’
them” (106), i.e., of having completed reading the lines of signifiers,
but not having made unifying sense of the signifieds. Since
Barthelme’s target is the clichéd language, the philosophical jargon,
rather than the substance of thought, the jargons are exchangeable.
He says in an interview that, instead of parodying stereotyped
existentialist popularizations in “Nothing: A Preliminary Account”,
“[y]ou could do the same story today and substitute the current
vocabulary and very little of the structure of the story would have to
be changed. Call it ‘Lacanthrope’” (O’Hara 1981, 207-8).
Still, there always resides in the background of what
Heidegger calls “Gerede”, or the fallen language of everydayness, or,
in Barthelme’s terms, the “trash phenomenon”, another domain. It
may be played with and ironized, but it establishes an additional
horizon of (depth) meaning, even ex negativo. Heidegger’s “Being”
is such a case. The deconstruction of logo-centric ways of thinking in
postmodernism goes hand in hand with the opening up of another
transcendental space, not only with Heidegger but also with the
poststructuralists, who have more directly influenced American
literature and literary criticism. Thus Derrida’s claims that we cannot
think beyond metaphysics and that transcendental concepts cannot be
abolished appear again to hit the mark. Metaphysics serves as the
ground of possibility for the language system that constitutes the
world.
Postmodern fiction exemplifies this presence of metaphysics
in its absence. Examples can be taken from narrative treatments of
angst. The existential experience of angst is the precondition for
apprehending Being, however imperfectly and obliquely. Angst is the
reaction to the “fallenness” and “thrownness” of humans, the
nothingness that opens up below the surface of every day life and its
“Gerede”. According to the existentialist philosophers, angst marks
the human ground-situation. The reaction of postmodern writers to
this basic situation is ambiguous. Barth’s writer/protagonist in “Life-
Story”, from Lost in the Funhouse, questions the existentialist
definition, even the very existence of such a human ground-situation:
Philosophy and Postmodern American Fiction 207

“You say you lack a ground-situation. Has it occurred to you that that
circumstance may be your ground-situation?” (115) And Barthelme
refutes the ground-situation. Humankind in The Dead Father is no
longer able to “tolerate the anxiety” (119). Thus art becomes an
attempt to get away from despair to achieve ease and bliss. But while
both authors appear to marginalize the problem of self and its
authentic identity (which occupied the modern novel to the degree of
obsession), the lack of anxiety is sensed as deficit. The “author of
novels and stories” from Barth’s “Life-Story”, for instance, is in a
depressed mood. The fact “that there was at this advancèd page still
apparently no ground-situation suggested that his story was
dramatically meaningless. If one regarded the absence of a ground-
situation, more accurately the protagonist’s anguish at that absence
and his vain endeavors to supply the defect, as itself a sort of ground-
situation, did his life-story thereby take on a kind of meaning?” (123)
Barth’s answer is at least in part ambiguous, and Barthelme’s, too.
One character in the latter’s City Life says to another: “Yours is not a
modern problem. [...] The problem today is not angst but lack of
angst” (165); and he adds in the statement quoted above, “anxiety [or
angst] is the central principle of all art”. Angst, even if it is not
overcome by reaching some kind of meaningful (metaphysical)
horizon, at least constitutes meaning insofar as it asserts the value of
life and the self, and discounts one of the biggest problems of the
postmodern novel: entropy. If there is no angst, it must be produced
creatively, even artificially, as mental construct. In that case it takes
the shape of paranoia, as in Pynchon’s novels. If anxiety and anguish
become too much to bear, if they open up the “nothingness” beyond
everydayness without offering a chance of transgressing concern and
angst, there is only the further possibility of suicide, as it occurs in
John Hawkes’s Travesty (1976).

4.7. Death and the Absurd

The one existentialist concept that became most important


for postmodern fiction is the idea of the absurd. One of the reasons
for this is that the absurd in the meaning Camus gave it is already a
reduction of existential concepts promoted by Kierkegaard, Sartre,
Heidegger, or Jaspers. Camus renounces the possibility of con-
quering the absurd through what was called the “leap”, the “jump to
208 From Modernism to Postmodernism

God’s side” (Kierkegaard), the affirmation of the circle of Life


(Nietzsche), the recourse to “Being” (Heidegger), Truth (Jaspers),
essential Freedom (Sartre). In the search of meaningfulness, these
philosophers acknowledge different types of essential experience,
which the modernist writers also reflect in their own texts. In The
Myth of Sisyphos, which is the classical text for Camus’s concept of
the absurd, even though he modified some of his positions in later
writings, there is no metaphysics or essence, nor any saving “leap”
into a sort of metaphysics of existence: there is only the disjunction
between the human being and the universe. Camus criticizes
attempted solutions by existentialist philosophers as “philosophical
suicide” (31): “That forced hope is religious in all of them” (24). He
does not want to reintegrate the absurd but intends to remain in
dissension and inner strife.
The absurd consciousness is an attitude, chosen by or thrown
on a person; it exists only “in man’s universe” (26). It is neither
rational nor irrational, and features no ordering principle; in its world
“chaos”, “chance and “equivalence” dominate. This world does not
permit belief “in the profound meaning of things” (54). Once “a man
[...] has become conscious of the absurd [he] is forever bound to it”
(24), and it becomes “a passion, the most harrowing of all” (17). This
means “rebellion”. Though the absurd hero cannot penetrate into the
depths of hidden meaning, which always remains hidden for him —
“absurd man can only drain everything to the bitter end, and deplete
himself” —”in that day-to-day revolt [he] gives proof of his only
truth, which is defiance”(41). Death is the only boundary. But the
experience of the absurd inaugurates something new: the experience
of freedom —not freedom as such, i.e., “metaphysical freedom” (41),
which is of no interest, but rather one’s own personal freedom “of
thought and action” (42), the right to “absurd freedom”. For the
absurd man, law is consciousness of contradictions (which requires
absolute clarity and constant awareness) and rebellion (which
demands freedom of action). Both belong together.
The “absurd man” lives as intensely as possible, without
guilt, hope, or future, experiences joy in his existing solely in the
“succession of presents” (47), lives “out his adventure within the
span of his lifetime” (49). He makes the leap into meaning not
“vertically”, but, so to speak, “horizontally” and quantitatively by the
collection of simultaneously intensive and diversive moments of
Philosophy and Postmodern American Fiction 209

existential experience. The diversivity of experience protects the


person from exhaustion by mere devitalizing repetition. Don Juan,
the lover, then the actor, and the traveler, are therefore preeminently
absurd figures. They combine in their lives diversity with intensity.
Camus paradoxically demands a combination of what he calls
“quantity ethic” (variety, diversity and change) with “quality ethic”.
The latter is again in itself contradictory. It demands both the
(reflexive) consciousness of universal absurdity and the (active)
enjoyment of moments of intensive living.
The absurd is used by postmodern writers as an undefined
word for purposes of reference, as a framework for reflection, a
philosophical matrix for the fictional design, or as atmospheric
background of existential fears and needs. They transfer the absurd
from one role to the other, deconstruct and reconstruct, playfully de-
existentialize and re-existentialize it. They thus adjust the absurd to
their own purposes, focusing on some aspects of the absurd and
leaving out others. The abandonment of an essentialist and centralist
structure of the universe, its transformation into nothingness, could
go well with deconstructive postmodern ideas. The fixation of
“absurd man”, the inalterability of absurd consciousness, its mono-
maniacal need for rebellion and freedom of action obviously do not
fit so well. Camus’s allegedly post-existential interpretation of
absurd consciousness retains the existentialist fixity of perspective
and worldview. It has as its basis pain and suffering. What makes the
absurd still attractive and fertile for the postmodern imagination,
however, is exactly its paradoxical character: the contradictions
between meaningless universe and the meaning-setting gesture of the
individual, between acceptance of unreasonableness and resistance
against it, between the rigidity and painfulness of absurd
consciousness and the joyful fulfilling of one’s life span, between the
“quantity ethic” of experiencing diversity and the “quality ethic” of
experiencing intensity, between the self-asserting clarity of mind and
the self-abandoning ecstasy of love, between, finally, consciousness
and “life”. The concept of the absurd is particularly interesting to
postmodern fiction, because, being a kind of “reduction model” of
existentialist thought, its paradoxical features offer space for many
variations and quite different accentuations. It is interesting as a
paradigm for the critic of postmodern narrative not only because it
has heuristic value for the analysis of the individual text (e.g., of
210 From Modernism to Postmodernism

Pynchon’s novels), but also because its use by the writers throws
light on the relationship between postmodern fiction and
existentialist thought in general.
The ambivalences of Camus’s system of thought, for
instance, allow Hawkes to change emphasis. He speaks of the
fundamental necessity” always to create and to throw into new light
our potential for violence and absurdity” (Dembo and Pondrom 6).
However, he also says: “I have a sense of Camus’s hero, the figure in
heroic struggle against meaninglessness, but to me what’s important
is the first recognition of meaninglessness, or the sheer insistence on
meaninglessness, which lies at the center of my work” (Ziegler and
Bigsby 176). In Gaddis’s The Recognitions, what everybody allows
everybody else is the “right to perform in allegory, to redeem, as best
his number imagination would permit him, the absurdity of reality”
(222). In Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow we read of the protagonist
that “[t]hose like Slothrop, with the greatest interest in discovering
the truth, were thrown back on dreams, psychic flashes, omens,
cryptographies, drug-epistemologies, all dancing on a ground of
terror, contradiction, absurdity” (582). Coover is obsessed with
“life’s inscrutable absurdities” (PD 117); and Camus is one of the
four writers of the twentieth century that have influenced Federman
(the others are Proust, Céline, Beckett).
Gass, finally, demonstrates how the aesthetic mode can
resurrect and revitalize exhausted concepts like the absurd, by
concentrating not on their truth value but their beauty as system of
thought. The best place for these concepts is in fiction, since the
philosophical views “objectively [...] have no grounds. [... yet]within
the novels, plays, and poems, they make sense and are strangely,
radiantly beautiful” (Ziegler and Bigsby 168). In a kind of
possibility-thinking, Gass is able to appreciate Camus and many
other authors (e.g., Plato, Aristotle, Plotin, Kant, Dante, Goethe). He
in fact proclaims as the appropriate attitude towards the history of
ideas what we have called the aesthetic attitude:

A novel has to build its own system. So within Camus I can be a sort of
crude existentialist. I’m not an existentialist; I think it’s a lot of baloney;
but in Camus I accept it. [...] You enter these various systems believing
they are beautiful. I am teaching Plotinus, and I think: it is so magnificent;
there is nothing I believe about it; yet this is a work of great art. [...]
Philosophy is full of such aesthetic moments, of moments when you shift
Philosophy and Postmodern American Fiction 211

into the only gear that really succeeds, and that is an aesthetic mode
(Kierkegaard would hate this) [...] An aesthetic theory which is really
forced to throw out this and throw out that — whole areas — just won’t
do. [...] That means that you must have a theory of sufficient generality
that it understands the grounds of aesthetic experience itself. It should not
exist just to be partisan for a particular mode. The same is true for
philosophy (Ziegler and Bigsby 165-67).

In the following section, Hawkes’s Travesty and Barth’s


story “Night-Sea Journey” from Lost in the Funhouse serve to
demonstrate the interaction of philosophical concept and fictional
design, of reflection and imagination.

4.7.1. Suicide and Clarity, Design and Debris: John Hawkes,


Travesty

In postmodern fiction the absurd is used as the aesthetic


conceptual frame for anxiety and anguish as well as for rebellion
against meaninglessness. Hawkes’s novel Travesty is an example of
what the postmodern author under the influence of Camus can do
with the idea of suicide. In this case, Hawkes abandons Camus’s
negative view on suicide in favor of a fascination with the experience
of death as the limit. He then relativizes this view by putting in
question the reality-status of the reported death scheme, making it
into a possibility, rather than a fictional actuality. Hawkes in an
interview speaks about the genesis of Travesty:

I recalled Camus’s idea that we can’t really live without first answering
the question, “Why not suicide?” [...] I more or less followed the pattern of
The Fall but subverted Camus’s question so that it became, not “Why not
suicide?”, but how suicide, when, and where. I was interested not in how to
live but in what could be most taxing to the imagination. It came to me
that cessation was the only thing unimaginable. Cessation and the
“existence of that which exists no longer” are the only concerns of my
narrator. [....] whereas The Fall is about the “prison” of Christian guilt,
Travesty is about a nameless man who sheds guilt, turns perversity into an
act of courage, and experiences what it is to be a poet (Ziegler and Bigsby
180-81).

In Travesty, a man (Papa) who is driving a powerful sports


car along a deserted road in the deepest darkness of the night with the
unshakable intention of ramming the automobile after a ride of one
hour and forty minutes into a thick stone wall and thus causing his
212 From Modernism to Postmodernism

and his companions’ deaths, demands from his two co-travellers, his
daughter Chantal in the back seat, who is vomiting from fear, and
Henry, the lover of his wife and daughter, sitting on the seat beside
the driver, the clarity of absurd consciousness (the necessity of which
Camus strongly emphasizes). In the course of his obsessively self-
contained discourse, the driver says that he has “never expected
anything at all from my life except clarity. I have pursued clarity as
relentlessly as the worshippers pursue their Christ” (104-5); and he
expects the others to strive for that clarity too:

in all this [our own situation] there is clarity but not morality. Not even
ethics. You and Chantal and I are simply traveling in purity and extremity
down that road [...] What does it matter that the choice is mine, not yours?
That I am the driver and you the passenger? Can’t you see that [...] we are
dealing with a question of choice rather than chaos? (14)

The emerging clarity would reveal to them the fundamental


contradiction of life (which parallels the new paradigm of order and
disorder proposed by the chaos and catastrophe theories), i.e., “the
design that underlies all [...] rambling [...] Design and debris, I thrive
on it” (27). Suicide as design is the design of freedom, as necessity,
death, is the design of chaos, “the point being that if design
inevitably surrenders to debris, debris inevitably reveals its innate
design” (59). The joyful living-out of one’s life’s adventures under
what Camus calls the “quantity ethic” is no longer enough to create
meaning by defiance, because experiences become repetitive, ex-
haust themselves: “there is nowhere I have not been, nothing I have
not already done” (75). Experiences can lead to clarity but cannot
provide coherence, a design. Only death can “complete” a life; death
alone is able to relieve a person of the necessity of being “always
moving”, “forever transporting myself somewhere else”; it alone can
fulfill “the propensity of mine toward total coherence” (75). In fact,
we rush off to die precisely because death’s terrible contradiction (it will
come, we cannot know what it is; it is totally certain, it is totally uncertain)
for some of us fills each future moment, like tears of poison, with an
anguish finally so great that only the dreaded experience itself provides
relief” (82-83).

The clarity and definiteness of this suicidal decision-making


is then relativized by the author’s play with the reality status of the
drive itself. It is not clear whether the narrated situation is actual or
Philosophy and Postmodern American Fiction 213

only imaginary, since the driver is simultaneously the victim and the
narrator of his own intentions, which if they were carried out would
make it impossible for him to narrate the situation in the car (unless
he had rehearsed it before the fact, and even then the outcome would
still be in doubt). Thus the situation and its conclusion remain
ambiguous, uncertain, and contradictory. The clarity and anguish of
the absurd consciousness are supposedly purified, purged of “pol-
lution” caused by the games of living, and radicalized in the free
choice of death as joyful gesture of defiance — only to be suspended,
if not reversed, by the ironic form of the novel manifested in the gap
between language/story and reality.
Still, whatever one might call a “metaphysical” horizon, here
it is clearly in evidence. Terms like “design” and especially “total
coherence” have a note of absoluteness. This absoluteness takes the
form of the absence-presence configuration that is the basis and the
focal constellation of postmodern strategies. The presence/absence of
total coherence in the world is here reflected in the presence/absence
of the subject at the intended experience of such coherence, in death,
and the presence/absence of the death scheme is mirrored in lan-
guage. Meaning adopts the form of paradox, which is, according to
Hawkes, the “significant shape” of the novel: “[T]he terrifying
similarity between the unconscious desires of the solitary man and
the disruptive needs of the visible world” take best “the shape of [a]
meaningful psychic paradox” (1962, 787). The paradox is a ground-
figuration in Hawkes’s novels. He chose the of The Blood Oranges
phrase because “[t]he fruit is sweet, but it’s streaked with the color of
blood, which to me is a paradox” (Bellamy 1974, 104-5). Paradox as
a figure of indissoluble contradiction can be played with, ironized
and comicalized, but it cannot be abolished; it is always present as a
basic fact of language, fiction and the world in postmodern narrative.
It opens the void. The penchant for paradoxical absence/presence
figuration in postmodern fiction at least partly explains, in spite of all
playful modification of the discourse, the leaning towards death
especially in novels by Hawkes and Pynchon, Coover, Federman,
and Elkin. In Lacan’s words:
214 From Modernism to Postmodernism

That is what life is — a detour, a dogged detour [...] deprived of any


significance. Why [...] does something happen, which insists throughout
this life, which is called a meaning? [...] A meaning is an order which
suddenly emerges. A life insists on entering into it, but it expresses
something which is perhaps completely beyond this life, since when we
get to the root of this life [...] we find nothing besides life conjoined to
death (1991b, 232).

4.7.2. The Absurdity of the Absurd: John Barth, “Night-Sea


Journey”

Barth, too, uses the idea of suicide discussed by Camus, in


both the later writer’s existentialist and postmodern phases. In his
early novel, The Floating Opera, he implicitly follows Camus in
rejecting suicide; later, in Lost in the Funhouse he employs it as part
of a pattern of ambiguities and ironies. When Barth was asked
whether Camus’s discussion of suicide in The Myth of Sisyphos had
influenced the characterization of Todd Andrews and the suicide
theme in The Floating Opera, his first (existentialist) novel, he
replied: “There certainly may be similarities between them, but it
didn’t color my work because I haven’t read The Myth of Sisyphos”
(Dembo and Pondrom 27). But he confirms that the absurd and
Camus’s version of absurd consciousness strongly influenced the
intellectual climate of the time that saw the dominance of the theater
of the absurd between 1950 and 1962: “I believe Camus says the first
question that a thoughtful man has to ask himself is why he is going
to go on, then make up his mind whether to blow his brains out or
not; at the end of The Floating Opera my man decides he won’t
commit suicide because there’s no more reason to stop living than to
persist in it” (27).
The stories in the collection Lost in the Funhouse exemplify
how the existentialist concept of the “absurd” can be used to link in
fiction the discourse of the actual, of being, to synthesize answers,
and the counter-discourse of the possible, of moving, deconstructive
questions. The word “absurd”, in all aspects of its meaning, is a
pivotal target of reflection and imagination. All four positions of the
absurd — the empty universe, the freedom of the heroic self in
conscious rebellion, the self living life to the full and exhausting
itself, the rejection of suicide combined with the necessity of death
—ironize one another and are refracted into manifold variations and
reversals. In “Night-Sea Journey”, what appears to be a self-
Philosophy and Postmodern American Fiction 215

conscious traveler reflecting on the imponderables of life turns out to


be not a person but a sperm cell on its nocturnal journey to the egg
cell. While thousands of sperm cells “drown” every second, the
survivors stay afloat by singing “Love!” The narrator swims in a
stream with millions of his fellows toward some unknown, only
intuitively grasped destination. It is by this fantastic transformation
of life’s journey that Barth secures a fusion of playfulness and
existential concern.
Right from the beginning, the spermatozoon, addressing
himself in an interior dialogue as a person in “wonder, doubt,
despair” (LF 4), embarks on the search for the meaning of meaning.
In order to clarify the preconditions and goals of existence and
knowledge, he argues on a meta-level of thought, questioning,
employing what Kant calls “transcendental reflection”, trying to
answer both existential and epistemological questions:

Is the journey my invention? Do the night, the sea, exist at all, I ask
myself, apart from my experience of them? Do I myself exist, or is this a
dream? Sometimes I wonder. And if I am, who am I? The Heritage I
supposedly transport? But how can I be both vessel and contents? Such are
the questions that beset my intervals of rest (3).

Trying to answer these existential questions, the narrator first


reflects not in terms of perplexity and dismay but in those of
playfulness and possibility-thinking. He finally focuses on the absurd
and uses its notions to reverse and at the same time to reinstate
traditional philosophical and theological positions without being
bound to the formal rules that logic requires for weighing evidence.

My trouble is, I lack conviction. Many accounts of our situation seem


plausible to me — where and what we are, why we swim and whither. But
implausible ones as well, perhaps especially those, I must admit as
possibly correct. Even likely. If at times, in certain humours — striking in
unison, say, with my neighbors and chanting with them “Onward!
Upward!” — I have supposed that we have after all a common Maker,
Whose nature and motives we may not know, but Who engendered us in
some mysterious wise and launched us forth toward some end known but
to Him — if (for a moodslength only) I have been able to entertain such
notions, very popular in certain quarters, it is because our night-sea
journey partakes of their absurdity. One might even say: I can believe
them because they are absurd. Has that been said before? (3)
216 From Modernism to Postmodernism

In the manner of Borges’ “The Library of Babylon”, the


swimmer refers to a whole canon of thought and builds an
intertextual realm of imaginative and reflective orders, suggesting
that the real is indeed mere thought and theory. Yet he does not give
up Camus’s existentialist ideas of the absurd. The absurd is the
underlying matrix of the argument and connects to the actual
situation, i.e., the “dull dread and a kind of melancholy, stunned
persistence” that is all that remains after losing belief in “vanity,
confidence, spirit, charity, hope, vitality” (9):

I’ve heard some say, even as they gulped their last: ‘The night-sea journey
may be absurd, but here we swim, will-we nill-we, against the flood,
onward and upward, toward a Shore that may not exist and couldn’t be
reached if it did.’ The thoughtful swimmer’s choices, then, they say, are
two: give over thrashing and go under for good, or embrace the absurdity;
affirm in and for itself the night-sea journey; swim on with neither motive
nor destination, for the sake of swimming (5).

What results from the imaginative/reflexive progress of the


story is a double paradox. The one is modern/existentialist in the
spirit of (modern) Nietzsche, stating that destruction is creation and
creation destruction. For the spermatozoon the egg cell is the
“mysterious being, indescribable except by paradox and vaguest
figure: wholly different from us swimmers, yet our complement; the
death of us, yet our salvation and resurrection; simultaneously our
journey’s end, mid-point, and commencement” (9-10). The story,
however, closes with a word of (postmodern) defiance that unravels
the synthesis while it confirms it at the same time: “there is no sense,
only senseless love, senseless death. Whoever echoes these
reflections [...] foreswear me when I shall foreswear myself, deny
myself, plunge into Her who summons, singing ... ‘Love! Love!
Love!’” (12, Barth’s ellipsis) Recognizable are both the existential
concern of the swimmer and the playful, ironic, comic tone of the
narrator, the latter of whom, though both are one, appears to win out
at the end, thus creating the postmodern paradox of deferred
meanings suggesting that something is meaningful only if it is
playfully open for other (also existential) meanings. This paradoxical
turn is confirmed by the ironic narrator-narrated relationship, just as
in Hawkes’s Travesty. The narrator going to his “death”, to be
swallowed up by the egg cell, is again simultaneously a victim and
the narrator of his own victimization, which he could not possibly tell
Philosophy and Postmodern American Fiction 217

if he had “died” in the fusion with “Her”. Both Hawkes’s and


Barth’s narratives demonstrate how the opposition of discourses, the
discourse of fictional actuality and the counter-discourse of
possibility and of speculation can be made the compositional
principle not only of the narrated situation but also of the recounting
situation of the narrator as well. We will return to concept and use of
the paradox in a comparison of modernism and postmodernism in the
next section.

4.8. Aesthetics in a Nutshell: The Modern and the Postmodern


Paradox

The postmodern paradox emerges out of the interaction of


the deconstructive and reconstructive forces of aesthetics. The
paradox is their common form. This is the reason why Barth
considers it so important for postmodern fiction. “[I]t does real work,
accomplishes real things in the real world” — and in narrative by
qualifying the otherwise “too simplistically optimistic, doctrinaire,
ideological, or whatever” (Ziegler and Bigsby 22). For Hawkes, as
mentioned, the paradox is the “significant shape” of the novel: “The
terrifying similarity between the unconscious desires of the solitary
man and the disruptive needs of the visible world” take best “the
shape of [a] meaningful psychic paradox” (1962, 787). We can here
refer back to what was said earlier about the link between the
postmodern writers and the pre-Socratic, pre-metaphysical Greek
philosophers. Both have a penchant for the paradox, though each
group employs it for their respective purposes. The structure of the
paradox is such that the discrepancies immanent to its form cannot be
solved by logic, though they still may contain a truth of their own, an
non-logical truth (see Geyer and Hagenbüchle); they undermine
Aristotelian logic, according to which any contradiction would make
a statement valueless. The paradox marks that which is excluded
from rational thinking and cultural norms; and since literature is
supposed to be subversive in its methods and goals, literary theorists
from the Romantics and the New Critics to the deconstructionists
have stated that, in Cleanth Brooks’s words, “the language of poetry
is the language of paradox” (1947, 3). The universal traits of the
paradox and its function, however, are varied by historical features.
Paradoxical statements, be they rhetorical paradoxes, logical
218 From Modernism to Postmodernism

antinomies, or paradoxes of “life”, define themselves, as all forms of


thought do, by their function and evaluation in historical, personal,
and literary contexts.
In modernism, the paradox transforms disjunction into an
artistically perfected shape that appears as the model of significant or
organic form. Thus Cleanth Brooks defines it in terms of oneness,
fusion, and synthesis. It is “a device for contrasting the conventional
views of a situation, or the limited and special view of it such as
those taken in practical and scientific discourse, with a more
inclusive view” (1947, 257; see also 1974). As a result the modern
paradox is “the assertion of the union of opposites” (213), of the
fusion of “conflicting elements in a harmonious whole” (1939, 37).
Ignoring the workings of time, of deconstruction and confusion, such
a paradox creates a static, assured, and settled structure of formal
symmetry. Brooks’s harmonizing optimism, his belief in the power
of organic form to come to a resolution that masters force and the
energetics of disorder and complexity, have evoked objection,
especially, in Murray Krieger’s words, against the harmonious
resolution of the “unchecked multiplication of complexities, hell-bent
for chaos” (135). Confusion, uncertainty, contingency, in short
chaos, allegedly checked by organic form in modernism, is now
loose in the complexities of postmodern fiction.42
The postmodern paradox is not what Brooks calls a (formal)
“device” of inclusion, of connecting opposites, mediating between
practical/scientific surface views and essentialistic depth views in an
organic form that contains and puts to rest the internal pressures from
incongruities and destructive elements. While high modernist
literature focuses on splits between subject and object or within the
self, and while the modern paradox is contained in form, held
together by the belief that contradictions can be resolved, postmodern
fiction goes beyond the split, opens and covers and again opens the
void, the gap, and nothingness, in a continuous movement to and fro;
its paradox cannot be harmonized by ordering form. It acknowledges
deconstructive force on its own terms and the indissoluble
contradiction of form and force, as well as the need to reconstruct the
world. The postmodern paradox places the impossible within the
possible, interconnects that which is not connectable, superimposes
perspectives that are not compatible. It both divides and fuses the
seemingly forever separate: exhaustion-replenishment, presence-
Philosophy and Postmodern American Fiction 219

absence, the familiar-the “other”, the ordinary-the extraordinary, and


actuality-possibility, i.e., the regulatory antitheses that used to
structure narrative as opposites. Their borderlines are now blurred
within an order that deregulates order, a form that highlights force,
disorder, chaos and the void. But postmodern paradoxical thinking is
not only an epistemological venture, the new truth of rejecting truth,
the sense that includes nonsense, the irrational exploding the rational.
It also includes the ethical contradictions at the extreme point of
human behavior, a point at which all humanistic values are negated,
i.e., in the grotesque. The grotesque stance is marked by a double-
coded paradox, a combination of a logical contradiction — that
rational human beings are irrational — which generates the
ridiculous, and the ethical contradiction — that humans are inhuman
— which gives rise to the ghastly and horrifying. The contrast
between the logical and ethical contradictions is such that it creates,
in addition to the logical and ethical paradoxes, a third one, namely
the unbridgeable contradiction between two attitudes and modes of
writing, the comic (resulting from the rational-irrational opposition)
and the horrifying (the outcome of the contrast human-inhuman). All
three together form the grotesque stance.
The poles of the postmodern paradox cannot be negotiated
because it is the paradox of life, of life’s experience with all its
irrationalities and gaps, transferred into narrative. Coover says that
“the writer’s experience is paradoxical. Like life itself [...] This is
partly what accounts for the peculiar structure of contemporary
fictions: they’re revealing this paradox, and in a sense imitating it, so
the forms themselves are seemingly not as coherent as old-fashioned
narratives” (Ziegler and Bigsby 87). All postmodern writers value the
paradox highly and use it for the designation of life’s and narrative’s
undeletable contradictions, the ultimate opposites of life and art,
stasis and dynamis, being and moving, the determinate and the
indeterminate, the articulate and the inarticulate, the finished and the
unfinished, surface and void, language and gap. Hawkes remarks:
“We take literal journeys, travel all over the place, but in a sense are
always stationary within the self. I like the paradox of going nowhere
and everywhere” (Ziegler and Bigsby 185). paradoxical opposites
create an existing world in situational boundaries, and at the same
time transgress these boundaries. In being placed on the edge of the
220 From Modernism to Postmodernism

comprehensible, the postmodern paradoxical figuration posits itself


at or even beyond the limit of representation.
The postmodern paradox has two facets. Frege’s “temporal”
paradox — that every proposition can become the object of another
proposition and be changed by it in an endless chain of propositions
— combines with the “spatial” absence-presence paradox. The result
is on the one hand what Borges calls, in reference to Kafka, “infinite
deferrals”, deferrals of the opening of the void and of the
confrontation with the absurd; on the other, however, it results in the
continuous confirmation of their presence in absence. Peterson, in
Barthelme’s “A Shower of Gold” from Come Back, Dr. Caligari,
reflects: “I was wrong, Peterson thought, the world is absurd. The
absurdity is punishing me for not believing in it. I affirm the
absurdity. On the other hand, absurdity is itself absurd” (182). This is
the absurd view of the absurd view which relates to the “tragic view
of the Tragic View”, postulated in Barth’s Chimera, and to
Barthelme’s above-quoted angst of the “lack of angst”. To survive,
one has to be, like McCamish in Coover’s The Universal Baseball
Association, a “negator even of negations”, who “surrenders to the
paradox, surrender facilitated by his conviction that paradox,
impossibility, confusion and emptiness are the natural abode of a
mind at rest” (230). Or one is a “positive negativist”, a term used in
Gaddis’s The Recognitions (200, 328). The ground-figure of these
paradoxes is Beckett’s “I can’t go on. I’ll go on”. What one faces in
the most extreme form of this paradox is Democritus’s phrase quoted
by: “Nothing is more real than nothing” (Moll 193). However, in
postmodern fiction, the nothing-versus-something configuration does
not produce Beckett’s pessimism but rather a new positivism, at least
a playful positivism of the writer, of the writer as “positive
negativist”. The ultimate point is finally reached where utter
alienation of the self paradoxically converges with, and turns into,
the liberation of consciousness through the play of the imagination,
and its opening activity.
It is the gap between the two contrasting poles that gives the
postmodern paradox its edge. It is the gap that is left unfilled
between contradictory propositions and remains unbridgeable, except
by “inventions of the imagination” (Foucault). In fact, the gap itself
is a paradox within the paradox. It defines as nothingness the
potential of fullness, and as fullness the threat of nothingness, and it
Philosophy and Postmodern American Fiction 221

is therefore the source of both elemental fear and vital creativity. The
gap is the subjectivist and the trans-subjectivist “ground-situation” of
the paradox; it is a negative shape in-between, created by the
circularity of all arguments and the mere virtuality of all figurations.
It both stimulates and obstructs the writer; it is the site of the
imaginary, where the possible meets the actual and vice versa.
Coover says: “That vibrant space between the poles of the paradox:
that’s where all the exciting art happens, I think” (LeClair and
McCaffery 67). Sukenick is more ambivalent: “In the space between
nothing is impossible. The gap. The blank space the clean slate.
Where the terror is. And where dreams condense like clouds in an
empty sky. Civilization comes down to a man staring at an empty
page” (1975a, 171). In Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, text and
protagonist seek “hopelessly to fill the void” (10), because, in the
phrasing at the end of Barthelme’s “Nothing: A Preliminary Report”,
“try as we may, we cannot do other than fail and fail absolutely [at
the task of defining nothing] and [...] the task will remain always
before us, like a meaning for our lives” (GP 165).
We are caught between two impossibilities, the
impossibilities of either filling or confronting emptiness. Francisco
Squalidozzi says in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow: “We cannot abide
that openness: it is terror to us. Look at Borges” (364). Barth puts
blanks in the text for the definition of identity (“Menelaiad”) and
death (LETTERS), and by doing so even abandons the poles of the
paradox, leaving only the gap, silence, which is itself a paradox,
considering the need of articulation. Or, moving back and forth
among creative possibilities and the limit, death, he employs
Borges’s “game with shifting mirrors” (to use the subtitle from a
Borgesian fictive novel, qtd. in Blüher 542), the mirrors of
possibilities acting like the juxtaposed parts of the paradox which
cover the terrible vacuum, the void, and still leave it open. Since,
according to the Sartre of Nausea (1942), “we have so much
difficulty imagining nothingness” (96), one has to use, in Barth’s
terms, the “metonymic” or the “metaphoric” methods to represent
emptiness, i.e., say what borders on it or what it is like, or,
ultimately, leave the gap and finish in silence. But the result remains
the same: failure. What outlasts everything else is the gap. The idea
of emptiness is the hallmark in Coover’s The Public Burning, in
which words hide terrible abysses and truths are without content, “a
222 From Modernism to Postmodernism

hole in the spirit. The motive vacuum” (263). The Rocket at the end
of Gravity’s Rainbow is defined by the gap, the in-between; it
“reaches its last unmeasurable gap above the roof of this old theatre”
(760). (One might think of one of Zeno’s paradoxes: “If I approach
the door in units of halves, I will never arrive”.) The ultimate
paradoxical opposition of postmodern fiction is the ontological
antithesis of something and nothing. Both poles are ultimately fused
into one, in life and in the text.
The postmodern paradox is the extreme case at the limit in
that it is on the defensive, but, imploding philosophical thought, it
transcends the limit by going on the offensive in an unlimiting,
paradoxically open practice of thinking and narrating. The
contradictions open up the singular in the general, the indeterminable
in the determinate, the mobile in the immobile. By no longer being
hermeneutically negotiable but only performatively suspendable,
these juxtaposed opposites deny “good” or common sense and its
uni-logical, predetermined direction; they introduce a derisive aspect
into the performance. The opposites reject and deride the traditional
course of consciousness, the turn from the particular to the general,
from the nomadic to the sedentary (see Deleuze 1990, passim). This
kind of paradox gains the offensive by explorative play. It is able to
create a dynamic, energizing continuum of contradictory, mutually
exclusive positions of thought and attitude because it exists only in
playful terms. Combining the “temporal” and “spatial” facets of the
paradox, dissemination, superimposition, and presence in absence
results in a paradoxical collage in flux as playful identity of force
and form.
The playful virtuality of the contrasting positions of the
postmodern paradox, finally, makes the oppositional structure of the
paradox itself only a virtual form. Its “virtualization” leads to its self-
destruction, which is the ultimate paradox. It paradoxically attains
the ability to bridge abysses by what Ihab Hassan calls “radical irony,
a term I apply to any statement which contains its own ironic denial”
(1982, 77). This radical irony serves the paradox, the extreme form
of serious reflection and of containing the dichotomies of thought
and life — paradoxically — by its self-denial fulfilling its task,
namely by imagining nothingness, by containing the void. The
insight into the necessity of ironizing and self-deconstructing, of
aestheticizing, i.e., holding in balance all proclaimed positions of
Philosophy and Postmodern American Fiction 223

judgment, especially the synthesizing theoretical ones, in order to


keep up the fluidity of thought, provokes a sort of paradoxical self-
deconstruction in philosophy as well; the means for it is a playfulness
that includes the ironic and comic modes.43
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5. The Fantastic

5.1. Definitions and Contexts

The disruptive dynamic force of the imagination creates


incongruities that we call fantastic. The latter has no form of its own
but is defined in relation to other forms by the perspectives of
negation and evaluation. The use of the term “fantastic” for the
analysis of postmodern fiction has a number of advantages. Most
importantly, it has its own history, or rather, the “fantastic” in fiction
has its own history and invites comparisons; it is also a category of
psychology and thus broadens the perspective by inviting the study
of similarities and differences in its use in various disciplines. The
application of the term “fantastic” to postmodern fiction is here based
(1) upon the dominance of an “irrealistic” quality in postmodern
narrative, (2) upon the necessity of conceptualizing this “irrealism”
in relation to what might be called the fictionally “real” or, rather, the
ideas of the real and the probable that function as horizon to the
discourse of the fantastic, and (3) upon the fact that the category of
the fantastic is employed for the epistemology and ontology of
postmodern fiction by the authors themselves. Since the
denomination “fantastic” is the most comprehensive category for
what postmodern fiction is like, it is imperative to analyze both the
conceptual scope of the term and its historical “filling” and framing
in fiction before we investigate the appearance and function of the
fantastic mode in postmodern narrative.
Definitions of the fantastic are mostly imprecise and
contradictory. Most theorists agree that the fantastic as a category is a
relational phenomenon, is tangential, “only presents itself, initially,
on the edge of something else” (Cixous, qtd. in Jackson 68), and can
be defined only in contrast to, or as modification of, what might be
loosely called the “real”.44 In Husserl’s terms, “[f]antasy is through
and through modification, and it cannot contain anything other than
modification”, and every modification is characterized by the fact
that “in itself is contained the reference to another consciousness of
which it is called modification” (Husserl 1980b, qtd. in Iser 1993,
202). This means that the fantastic has no objects of its own; it
constitutes itself by modifying existing ones. Consciousness needs
226 From Modernism to Postmodernism

the fantastic as a generative matrix to negate the given, to give


presence to the non-given, the absent, to present the alternative, the
other. Transformation is the hallmark of the fantastic. Critics agree
that, epistemologically or ethically, the fantastic has transgressive
function: it expands the idea of the real, making appearance
disappear, replacing presence with absence, and superseding absence
with newness.
It can be attributed to the private sector as “protective
fictions”, psychical facades, which bar the way to memories (Freud
1966, i, 247- 48), or to the social sector, serving, for instance, satire
and the grotesque. Following Freud’s remark “that fantasy [in
contrast to dreams] is always progressive”, Jacqueline Rose states
that it “is not [...] antagonistic to social reality”, that it in fact “sheds
its private illicit nature and goes to work in the world at large” and
thus should be placed “at the heart of our political vocabulary” (2-4).
And in the course of the new interest of the nineties in the problems
of verbal visualization as part of the interest in reader response, the
fantastic can be used to delineate “the fantasmatic filling-in that
fiction generates”. (Schwenger 2).
As far as the definition of the fantastic is concerned, there
has not been much progress since Rein Zondergeld’s statement in
1973 “that research and theoretical discussion in this controversial
area has hardly begun yet” (10, my translation).45 Most attempts at
defining the category of the fantastic beyond the statement that it is
contrasted to the “real” have failed because of difficulties in
establishing unambiguous criteria.46 The most rigorous analysis of the
fantastic has been undertaken by Tzvetan Todorov in his The
Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. In the
following discussion, Todorov’s much-cited definition (rather than
those of Roger Caillois, Pierre Castex, and Louis Vax, which, though
well-known, are less comprehensive in scope)47 shall be our starting-
point. For Todorov, as for Caillois, the fantastic is an irruption of the
unusual, the unnatural, the causally inexplicable, into the ordered
familiarity of the everyday. But Todorov was the first to attempt a
systematic poetics of the fantastic in the sense that he dispenses with
extra-literary categories and analyzes the literary structure of the
fantastic, still using, however, a psychological approach. The
fantastic for Todorov lies not so much in the actual event (which,
according to his terminology, would constitute something marvelous)
The Fantastic 227

as in the reaction of the subject experiencing the supernatural: “The


fantastic [...] lasts only as long as a certain hesitation” persists
between “the uncanny” where “the laws of reality remain intact and
permit an explanation of the phenomena described” and the
marvelous where “new laws of nature must be entertained to account
for the phenomena” (1975, 41). Scholars who analyze the fantastic
often follow this definition, but it would seem problematical in three
respects. First, it restricts the fantastic to certain topics and motifs
within the realm of the supernatural, on the border of which the
fantastic is situated; this would exclude play with the fantastic
construct, which is a decisive feature of the formation of the fantastic
in postmodern fiction. Second, it reduces the fantastic to the reaction
of individual subjects, their hesitation (“the hesitation is represented,
it becomes one of the themes of the work” [33]), their vacillation
between a natural and supernatural explanation of their experience
within the text. And third, his categories are inflexible. He speaks of
the “laws of reality” and “laws of nature”, while postmodern
narrative is based on the blurring of the borderlines between reality
and fiction.48
Due to his reduction of the fantastic to a psychological
phenomenon within the text, Todorov is generally obliged to restrict
its occurrence to the nineteenth century and also to exclude Poe
(most of whose tales are placed within the “truly uncanny”).
Maupassant’s short stories seem to him the last convincing examples
of the fantastic genre. For Todorov, a twentieth-century
representation of the supernatural such as Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”
has as its distinctive feature the fact that “the most surprising thing is
precisely the absence of surprise with regard of the unheard-of-
event”, and that it assumes “an increasingly natural atmosphere as
the story progresses” (1975, 169). Though Todorov defines the
fantastic not only as a genre but also as an aesthetic category, he
neglects the fact that an aesthetic category (being a formal principle)
should be devoid of fixed content and defined rather as a model or
open structure, as a function in the process of communication
between text and reader. This openness should include the possibility
that the counter-position to the fantastic, concepts of the real or of
order, can be situated either in the text or in the consciousness and
response of the reader. The fantastic can thus be constituted not only
by the shock experienced by a figure in the text, but also (as in
228 From Modernism to Postmodernism

Kafka) by the contrast between the reader’s expectation of the


fictional “real” (or order) and the irreal or chaotic representation of
the world in the text. Furthermore, the fantastic need not only be
primarily a limited psychological phenomenon in the text but can
also be a total ontological estrangement that poses unanswerable
epistemological questions.
In our analysis, the fantastic as category is understood in
opposition to an assumed “real”; it is a category both of the
experiential, extra-linguistic reality and the intratextual, linguistic
world. The fantastic and the real are situated on two borderlines:
between “reality” and the text, and between the text and the reader.
The fantastic is thus not defined by a textual category alone (because
in the text there is only the actual and the possible), but by an
extratextual one, the real, which of course can be “imported” into the
text as the idea of the real and as such made functional for the
definition of the fantastic. But further differentiations appear ad-
visable. The fantastic appears within the text not only as the opposite
of the real, which exists in the text only as the idea of the real
anyway, but as the disruptive force that denies the category of order
in order to develop its own order, which includes disorder, chaos.
This new form is, as we argued above, the paradox. From the
viewpoint of the reader, the fantastic is experienced both intra-
textually as disorder, and extratextually as the suspension of the
expected, the “natural” and the “real”, the familiar and common-
sensical.49 The postmodern author (and possibly the reader) might see
the fantastic along with Philip Roth as the ingredient of the socially
and culturally real that is reflected in the text: “[T]he American
writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying to
understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of
American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is
even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination. The
actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up
figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist” (144).50 This
cultural scene is characterized by an exhaustion of the objectivity and
subjectivity espoused by nineteenth- and twentieth-century novelists
respectively as totalizing frames of reference, and by the abandon-
ment of those norms and principles that once lent coherence to the by
now disparate social, economic, and cultural realms. These shifts in
vision and technique (frequently revealing the shaping influence of
The Fantastic 229

such movements as surrealism and of such writers as Kafka and


Borges) form the basis of what one may call the new creative
totalizing fantastic, which, as we argued before, does not exhaust
itself in negation but turns negation against itself in order to gain new
space for the imagination and its inexhaustible potential for creating
possible worlds.
Setting disorder against order, the totalizing fantastic has at
least three functions: in regard to the world, it creates the force of
defamiliarization; in regard to the self, it enforces a sense of
alienation; and in regard to the imagination, it generates a liberation
from the dead matter of tradition and convention. The first and the
second functions are psychological in a narrower sense. The
totalizing fantastic mode thus comprises the psychological (and the
social/satiric) fantastic in spite of the fact that postmodern fiction is
anti-psychological and anti- Freudian. It is helpful at this point to
refer to psychological and psychoanalytical theories because they
have theorized the fantastic and put it on the map as an independent
category. In fact, Freud’s displacement theory and the theories of
psychosis developed by Lacan and Laing can help to give the
fantastic in the text a general basis in human experience which the
reader might also share. Being the correction of a schema, of order,
and the real, the fantastic in fiction does what it has always done: it
manifests that which has been excluded from rational knowledge,
displaced by the ego, and tabooed by society. In the description of
this displacement mechanism, literature and psychology — or, more
accurately, psychoanalysis — find a common field of interest.
Freud used the term “fantastic” to mark that threshold
beyond which — in life as in literature — the world of reason and
science is abandoned for irrational spheres. He saw “the laws of the
unconscious embodied” (1968c, 121) in fantastic literature, and
found in the “correspondence” between literature and theory a
“proof” for the “accuracy” of the latter (1968a II, 3, 101). Freud’s
interpretations of E.T.A Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” and W.
Jensen’s “Gradiva”51 show that he transferred the method of dream
interpretation to literature, ignoring the intricate unity of the work of
art and reading the latter instead as a rebus that does not follow the
laws of its own structure but those of hieroglyphs that must be
deciphered and put into a meaningful order revealing the mechanism
of displacement. The theory of psychosis follows Freud’s path but no
230 From Modernism to Postmodernism

longer speaks of “embodiments” of the laws of the unconscious in


fantastic literature so emphasized by Freud; instead, a
“hermeneutically understandable context of meaning” is constructed
by employing the fantastic as a model of psychosis (Habermas 1968,
331). Ronald D. Laing (1965), citing texts by Blake, Hölderlin,
Keats, Strindberg, Kafka, and Yeats, has made the fantastic a part of
this (psychological) terminology and has thus introduced the notion
of the fantastic into the theory of psychosis. The fantastic is thus
defined as a state of mind where the sense of control over reality is
dissolved and replaced by illusions, phantoms, and hallucinations.
The connection between the fantastic in literature and in
psychological theory, traceable to the beginning of psychoanalysis, is
thus firmly established.
But there is also disagreement among theorists of psychosis
about the significance of the basic configuration of psychic
disruption, as J. Metzner has shown.52 Lacan, for instance, has placed
the “subversion of the cogito” at the center of psychoanalysis
(Metzner 92). Since, according to Lacan, the human organism in the
neo-natal months feels a primordial discord and uncoordination
(1977, 4), which are only overcome by fantasies of totality through
the subject’s perceiving of such external totality (in the mirror stage)
and subsequently internalizing this totality, psychotic collapse is no
less than the moment of truth, the restoration of the original state of
disruption that had been transformed into an illusion of wholeness
and identity only by an act of self-deception. Hence, the perception
of wholeness in the other, leading to the subject’s misunderstanding
of himself or herself as a totality, and the collapse of the self, are
caused not merely by a disintegration of the structure of the self, but
by a complex pattern of interaction and breakdown. Laing has
generalized this concept of the constitution and threatening of the self
by the other and has taken it to be something permanent that persists
far beyond the stage of socialization. The self is for Laing the sum of
the experiences that one thinks others have undergone in relation to
oneself. It is thus a product of fantasy and can easily be shattered by
a loss of social contact. The self then becomes fantastic because the
“system of social fantasy” is no longer intact (1965, 111). Since
Lacan and Laing, this postmodern inter-actionistic understanding of
psychosis has been dominant. It is obvious that in this view
“normality” and the shattering of “normality” are equally “fantastic”,
The Fantastic 231

thus preparing the ground for the dominance of the fantastic in


postmodern fiction (and already in some “modern” texts, such as
those of Kafka).
The introduction of phenomenological methods has further
elaborated the interpretation of this mechanism of psychic disruption.
Binswanger has suggested that we speak instead of the return of the
displaced, of the “sudden irruption of the new into experience” (425,
and Gabel) and has adopted this alternative understanding of
psychosis to establish a sociopathological theory, holding that it is a
deficient experience of reality caused by society that is responsible
for the collapse of the ego. The breach in Lacan’s system of
interaction becomes for Gabel a matter of alienation originating in
the mechanization, functionalization, and reification of human
interrelationships and social conditions in general. It leads to the loss
of flexibility and of dialectical thinking, so that the subject can only
experience the dialectic of the real as a threat and, in extreme cases,
as a “rent” in his or her picture of the world, which causes a
disruption of the self and a fantasizing of the perception of the world.
While Freud, Lacan, Laing and Gabel see the disruptions of
psychosis occurring as the result of a lack of equilibrium, of
interaction or contact with reality, and thus diagnose it as something
abnormal, one can turn the tables and postulate, as David Cooper has
done, that in psychosis reality is experienced as a threat not because
the subject has a wrong perception of it, but because he or she has the
right, actually the “normal” idea, and that reality is indeed a threat.
One can see how this perception of psychosis accords with the nature
of the fantastic in Kafka and partly in postmodern literature, where
the fantastic becomes an all-encompassing feature of the textual
strategies.
The various interpretations of psychosis listed here
demonstrate a number of important points. (1) There is not only one
psychological or psychoanalytical understanding of psychosis and
hence of the fantastic as deviation or correction in literature. (2) One
is able to choose between the various explanations of psychosis and
use them for the interpretation of the same fantastic text. (3) There
are apparent affinities between certain theories of psychosis and
certain forms of the fantastic. (4) A psychological or psycho-
analytical explanation of the fantastic cannot contribute directly to a
definition of the literary fantastic; it can serve as a tool for the
232 From Modernism to Postmodernism

interpretation of certain yet by no means all forms of the fantastic in


literature. While, for instance, Freud’s psychoanalytical theory
(giving the ego a humanistic, mediating role between the super-ego
and the id) sees psychotic disruption as a “collapse” of the ordering
ego, the literary fantastic can represent psychic catastrophe as a
restoration of the order of disorder, of truth if it is understood as
lying in disorder. (5) The psychological grounding of the fantastic
that almost exclusively pays attention to the abnormality of the
fantastic and the threat it poses to the person is obviously not
sufficient for an understanding of the fantastic in narrative, where it
has its own literary function as an aesthetic phenomenon based on
anthropological verities. It gives scope to an outflow of the
imagination; it serves a liberation from the narratives of reality and
from exhausted conventions. It is thus a tool for the workings of
freedom, for the free construction of possible, alternative worlds, a
means of guaranteeing the autonomy of art in the limit case, at “the
end of the road”, to quote the title of Barth’s novel.
As force the fantastic produces disorder, which takes the
shape of incongruities. The incongruities of “irrealism” can be
moderate or radical deviations from order and the idea of the real,
and various types of the fantastic can be distinguished according to
the tension that is built up in the text and maintained between (the
idea of) the “real” and the unreal or between order and disorder.
Since incongruities are also the basis of other perspectives of
negation, of the comic and the parodic, of satire and the grotesque,
they can use and form the fantastic. The fantastic in these cases
serves the modes of evaluation, which then further perspectivize the
fantastic in terms of the dialectic between order and disorder, the
good and the bad. The fantastic is linked with chaos and abstraction
because both are manifestations of negation, negation of the
commonsensical real. Chaos and abstraction will be used here,
together with negation of order in general, for an analysis of the
fantastic as an aesthetic phenomenon, of what Barth calls (post-
modern) “irrealism” (LF 112). We will first examine the aesthetic
modes of the fantastic and then the role of chaos, abstraction and the
void for the constitution and function of the fantastic in the
postmodern text.
The Fantastic 233

5.2. The Fantastic as Aesthetic Mode

The fantastic deviation from a norm and the fantastic


creation of incongruities are subject to an evaluating perspective that
gives it sense and determines its scope and radicality. Accordingly
the fantastic ranges (1) from the world created by willing suspension
of disbelief in the fairy-tale, through (2) the depiction of the
“abnormal” side of the human soul, to the (3) satirically and
grotesquely fantastic that is directed aggressively outwards, exposing
through extreme deformations of the narrative surface the
deformations of society; to what is called (4) “magic realism”, with
its programmatic fusion of the fantastic and the real, and (5) the
hermetically fantastic world that questions and, as it were, engulfs
the idea of the real and of order, not differentiating between reality
and fiction. It is important to note that postmodern fiction makes use
not only of type five but also employs and transforms types one to
three, while there are obviously problems in relating magic realism to
postmodern fiction, as we will see later.
(1) On the level of selection and combination, the fantastic
may merely be the extension of the finite, an expansion or
manipulation of space and time, a connection of sudden and sur-
prising events, a grouping of episodes generating terror, an
enumeration of hyperboles of riches and power, poverty and
oppression. The “natural” and the “artificial” are not contrasted here.
A world is created that stretches and even outdoes the real without
rebelling against its standards of behavior and value-judgments. The
ordinary is heightened by the imagination, which can receive its own
consecration in the distant and timeless land of the Fairy Queen. This
type of the non-aggressive, often neither satirically outer-directed nor
psychologically inner-directed fantastic is found in the fairy-tale, in
certain kinds of fantastic adventure stories, or in such collections as
The Thousand and One Nights. It is an early, “totalizing” type of the
fantastic, which, however, persists in popular fantastic fiction — the
novels of H. P. Lovecraft, for instance — and in its transformation
into science fiction in the twentieth century. The existential “rent”
between two dimensions of the fictional world and the split in the
soul are not thematized in this variety of the fantastic, though the
uncanny may appear in all forms of hesitation, anxiety and fear. But
ultimately the sense of the real (of order), if it ever has been shaken
234 From Modernism to Postmodernism

by the uncanny, can easily be reestablished. And the same is true of


goodness, truth, nobility and social order, which need no definition
but are decreed authoritatively and confidently from the belief in an
ultimately benevolent universe. Sartre who sees in the fantastic a
perennial form manifesting itself in historical shape, refers this kind
of the fantastic to a metaphysical horizon, saying that as long as
religious belief had been operative, fantasy opened other realms and
fulfilled a compensatory, escapist function: “It manifested our human
power to transcend the human. Men strove to create a world that was
not of this world” (1965, 55). In a secularized universe, fantasy does
not point to the supernatural but presents something strange,
something “other”, in which definite meanings are not possible.
Employing a method of superimposition, postmodern
narrative uses the fairy-tale fantastic mode for the double coding of
the created world, for creating its ontological multi-valence.
Postmodern Fiction entertains two possibilities of employing the
fairy-tale for its purposes. First, it starts out with an existent fairy-tale
and changes it, fantasizing, as it were, once more that which is
already fantastic. The model case is Barthelme’s Snow White. He
says in an interview, “the usefulness of the Snow White story is that
everybody knows it and it can be played against [...] Every small
change in the story is momentous when everybody knows the story
backward; possibly I wasn’t as bold in making these changes as I
should have been” (LeClair and McCaffery 42-43). Another, perhaps
even more radical example is Coover’s Briar Rose, a poetic
recreation of the Sleeping Beauty story with a set of intricate
variations on the old fairy tale. The book tells of a prince trapped in
the briars, of a sleeping beauty who cannot awaken and of dreams of
a succession of kissing princes, and an old fairy who inhabits the
princess’s dreams and tries to please her with legends of other
sleeping beauties. The artistic principles according to which the text
is composed are the postmodern paradigms of appearance vs.
disappearance, singularity vs. plurality, narration vs. reflection, the
result being a kind of “may-be” style of (possibility)
narration/thinking, which transforms its basis, the fixed formula of
the fairy tale. The briars that hold the prince captive disappear and
reappear. So do the princes who kiss the princess, and the children
who appear to belong to her but then disappear and reappear. the
central characters and the pivotal situations are multiplied, repeated,
The Fantastic 235

and varied: the prince in the briars, the princess sleeping and
dreaming, the sleeping beauty, and the prince who tries to kiss her
awake. The aim is the typical postmodern double or rather multiple
coding, the aestheticization of that which already has been
aestheticized, the fantastication of that which already has been
fantasticized. The result of this procedure is the multiplication and
overlay of uncertainties, the transformation of the simple
uncertainties of the fairy-tale formula into existential, epi-
stemological ,and ontological uncertainties, with “the longing for
integrity [...] itself fragmented”, “with a castle where “[s]ometimes
there are walls, doors, ceilings, sometimes not”, with self-reflexive
questions about the self: “Who am I? She wants to know”; or about
the status of the heroic quest: “Which is? Honor. Knowledge. The
exercise of his magical powers. Also love of course”, “the love of
love”. Further questions are asked about motivation: “he wishes he
could remember more about who or what set him off on this
adventure,[...] which is probably not even ‘his’ at all, but rather a
something out there in the world beyond this brambly arena into
which he has been absorbed”; or simply about “what is ‘whole’?” or
about “the dreadful void”. The prince finally realizes (the text
alluding to and rejecting or expanding Wittgenstein’s famous
opening statement in his Tractatus, “The world is all that is the
case”): “There is a door that is not a door. That is where it all begins.
He knows that nothing at this castle is simply what it is, everything
has a double life” (BR 2, 6, 4, 67, 12, 15, 3, 45, 69). The strategy is to
fill out the “holes”, the possibilities left unused in the old tales,
which Coover also does in “The Gingerbread House” (Hänsel and
Gretel). Barth also uses this method of reworking old legends in
Chimera or in the stories from The 1001 Tales in Chimera, and in
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor, a recast of the Sinbad
story.
The second method of employing the fairy-tale formula is to
make use of the transformational possibilities that lie in the current
socio-cultural system. The latter, as it were, creates its own quasi-
fairy-tale world. Both cases, however, have something in common:
the mixture of the fairy-tale world and a current world of quite
different status, and the attempt to draw advantages from this tension
for the composition and the “theme” of the book. The result is an
overlay of worlds, whether the direction runs from the fairy-tale to
236 From Modernism to Postmodernism

the current world, or from a current world to a fantastic fairy-tale-like


one. The strategy of transformation is play, and play is the loosener
of borderlines and rigid form; the playful process is a continuous
movement to and fro. In fact, in the fantastic mode “play always
plays with what has been achieved by playing” (Iser 1993, 265). In
the second case, the writer gives the created world traits of the fairy-
tale or the mythic story (which takes on features of the fairy-tale by
being played with). Playing with the features of the fairy/mythic tale,
however, does not prevent their matrices from being used as
organizational forms. Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy and Chimera are
pertinent examples of how to build a plot on mythic/fairy-tale
schemata that organize patterns of initiation, of maturing,
succeeding, and failing. And so is, in quite another way, Coover’s
The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.
Coover’s novel starts out with the current world of everyday
life, which then turns into an imaginary world of obsession; the
world of obsession separates itself in a final stage from its originator
and, so to speak, floats away in space and time. The protagonist,
Henry Waugh, becomes fanatically obsessed with a table-top
baseball game that he has rigged up with an elaborate system of dice
and charts (the system, not the originator of the game, actually
deciding what happens in the ball games). He is finally so
passionately involved with the imaginary players (who take on their
own personalities) and the events that happen to them that he comes
to believe in their literal existence. The Universal Baseball
Association finally creates a self-reliant imaginary counter-universe
with its own sense of beauty, order, balance, and mythic attributes. It
develops its own status as a new dimension of the actual with
impressive power and extensive demands on its creator: “Odd thing
about an operation like this league: once you set it in motion, you
were yourself somehow launched into the same orbit” (UBA 142). At
the end, by his interventions, which are against the rules, Henry “was
destroying the Association [...] it was strangely as though they [the
players] were running from him, afraid of his plan, seeing it for what
it was: the stupid mania of a sentimental old fool” (176).
In the last fantastic chapter Coover frees the Association
from its creator, one hundred baseball seasons after the last events. A
“welter of myths, religious allusions, bits of folklore, allegories of
the Old and the New Testaments, metaphysical speculations, and so
The Fantastic 237

on” (McCaffery Metafictional Muse 1982, 55) form the new world of
the Association that replays on Damonsday a combination of the old
games in which Damon and Casey were killed. The relationship to
the present of the text is established by the fact that the players repeat
the problems of the current world. Their attempts to disclose the
meaning behind their activities are thwarted by the contradictions
and ambiguities of the signs available to them. They only lead to “the
final emptiness” (UBA 239), which, however (in the manner of fairy-
tales), is overcome at the end by the realization that “the game” (just
like the game of life) is “not a trial” or “a lesson”: “It’s just what is”
(58; cf. Wittgenstein’s “The world is all there is”). According to
Coover, the role of the artist is to become “the mythologizer, to be
the creative spark in this process of renewal: he’s the one who tears
apart the old story, speaks the unspeakable, makes the ground shake,
then shuffles the bits back together into a new story” (Wolff 54). The
Universal Baseball Association, Coover’s Briar Rose, and
Barthelme’s Snow White, confirm, though in different ways, the fact
that the postmodern totalizing, but de-unifying, fantastic, the
liberating fantastic of the imagination, accommodates the
psychological fantastic as a foundational component, though it is
anti-psychological and anti-Freudian. Postmodern fiction often even
extends the psychological basis of the fantastic to the (modernist)
split self, with which our next section will deal. This is true even if
psychology is played with, as it is in all three novels mentioned.
(2) The fantastic may concentrate on the narrated characters
and, in extreme cases, split them in two: i.e., juxtapose an
“abnormal”, unconscious, deeply disturbing, and hidden part of the
soul against the “normal”, rational, everyday kind of social life the
protagonist leads, and also against a surface consciousness defined
by the well-mapped-out, predictable, and fact-oriented aspects of life.
Todorov’s fantastic (a person’s “hesitation” between natural and
supernatural explanations of a disturbing event) is a concentration of
such a character-split into a moment of reaction to something that
happens to a character, generally from outside. However, this
character-split can also be marked by the fantastic as being
something constitutive of a “sensitive”, “artistic” or diseased, even a
“normal” person, and thus it may be a means of extending the
fictional psychology of character by a view in depth. The Romantic
fantastic of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Nachtstücke, of some of Poe’s tales,
238 From Modernism to Postmodernism

and Henry James’s ghost stories is of this kind. This type of the
fantastic depicts a state of insecurity, even alienation, and at the same
time a “rent” in the accustomed order, the “rupture de l’ordre
reconnu”, an “írruption de l’inadmissible”, which for Caillois defines
the fantastic (1965, 161). Fundamental disorientation through the
fantastic complexity of the world and a conflict within consciousness
of the self can lead in extreme cases to the subjective deformation or
suspension of the cognitive categories of space, time, and causality,
thence to an existential threat to the narrated character’s ego, and in
extreme cases to insanity. Writing about the uncanny, with reference
to E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman”, Freud associates the
fantastic, the “unfamiliar”, with the concealed desire of which it is a
projection: “to make it uncanny [...] it is in reality nothing new or
alien, but something which is familiar and old — established in the
mind and become alienated from it only through the process of
repression” (1953, 218). Here the fantastic and the hallucinatory
meet, and both are brought into relationship with neurosis, paranoia,
and madness. Dostoevsky, in whom Bakhtin attests a plurality of
discourses, a confrontation of ideologies, dissolution, dialogism and
polyphony,53 writes:

But you know that if there is no soil and if there is no action possible, the
striving spirit will precisely express itself in abnormal and irregular
manifestations — it will mistake the phrase for life, it will pounce upon
the ready but alien formula, it will be only too glad to have it, and will
substitute it for reality! In a fantastic life all functions, too, are fantastic
(qtd. in Linner 55).

Up to (and partly including) the postmodern novel, this


psychological function has been an important aspect of the fantastic
— the latter working at and transgressing the boundary line between
normality and abnormality, adaptation and alienation, entropy and
paranoia, between the mentally “healthy” and the mentally ill or
deranged (see, for instance, Gaddis, The Recognitions; Pynchon,
Gravity’s Rainbow, The Crying of Lot 49; Coover, The Universal
Baseball Association, The Public Burning, Briar Rose; Gass,
Omensetter’s Luck, The Tunnel; Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor, Giles
Goat-Boy; Elkin, The Dick-Gibson Show, The Franchiser). In
aesthetic modernism, the state of extraordinary sensitivity is
generally seen as an advantage because it creates an increased
The Fantastic 239

awareness, and awareness creates identity. But in the postmodern


novel nobody knows if awareness is an advantage, if there is
anything, a truth or one’s identity, of which one can or should be
aware. This makes the sensitive character ironizable and potentially
comic; at least it can appear under multiple perspectives. In
Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 fantasy is the sign of sensitivity and
imagination, and it seems to be a great good. When Oedipa visits her
psychoanalyst for help against what she calls paranoia and tells him
“I came [...] hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy” [that there is
a counter communication system called Tristero], he cries “fiercely”,
“Cherish it [...] What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by its
little tentacle, don’t let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists
poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it
you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be”
(103). Yet also here the multiple perspective reigns. He may be and
probably is right in the book’s terms, but he himself is becoming
crazy, has a shoot-out with the police who try to arrest him, and
Oedipa herself is paranoiac and almost crazy and definitely
exhausted and unhappy at the end.
(3) The fantastic may be part and means of an ethical
evaluation of the fictional world. Making visible the invisible in
society and culture, it serves an additional perspective like the satiric
or the grotesque and the absurd, which in this case are superimposed
upon the fantastic deformations of the given. All three perspectives
mentioned, the satiric, the grotesque, and the absurd, indeed require a
fantastic deformation of the world in order to function. Northrop
Frye sees the world as becoming the more fantastic and “absurd” the
more the image of “reality” is dominated by a satiric perspective; for
the satiric world-view requires “at least a token fantasy, a content
which the reader recognizes as grotesque” (which in Frye’s
somewhat vague terminology appears to mean “deformed” [224]).
We will return to the perspectives of negativity in the last chapter of
the book.
(4) The fantastic is directly coupled with the real, or, rather,
it implodes the real; it defines itself in relation to an extra-textual
concept of the “real”, with which it blends. The problems that arise in
this case are demonstrated by what has been called “magic realism”.
The notion of “magic realism” is oxymoronic in that it combines two
different representational codes or discursive systems: an inner-
240 From Modernism to Postmodernism

linguistic one and extra-linguistic one. They battle with and


neutralize each other, in fact create perspectives of the world that are
incompatible, neither of them gaining the upper hand, each
remaining suspended, in disjunction with the other, and thus avoiding
interpretative closure but suffering the loss of clarity. The lack of
clarity, but also the questions about origin, function, and aim of
magic realism, provide reasons for a controversial debate. Magic
realism is considered an outgrowth of French surrealism, or the
native form of Latin American realism,54 and lately the signum of
post-colonial emancipation in general, including the literatures of the
New English languages. Yet despite its contradictions, the concept of
“magic realism” retains a “strange seductiveness” (Jameson 1986,
302), and is, according to John Updike, “a now widely available
elixir” (113), probably not in spite of, but rather because of, the
paradoxical relation of its two poles, paradox being the hallmark of
the New Fiction. The forms and aims of magic realism put it in
relation to postmodern fiction and at the same time contrast it to
postmodern epistemology and deconstructionist language-theory.
The similarity of magic realism and postmodern fiction lies in the
high valorization of the imagination and the imaginary; the contrast
between the two is based upon magic realism’s interpretation of its
attitude, aim, and style in terms of realism, while postmodern fiction
argues in terms of irrealism, of possibility narration. Yet this does not
prevent magic-realist writers from having a great influence on the
postmodern American authors.
The most important difference in the conceptualization of
magic realism emerges from the understanding of the two terms,
“magic” and “realism”. One may understand, as Leal does, the magic
part of magic realism in universal terms, as a sign of opposition
against the hegemonic paradigms of the Enlightenment and the
aligned schools of realism which affirm rational models; and/or one
may territorialize it in its homelands, in Latin America.55 Magic
realism has been considered the appropriate style of the Latin
American novelists because, in García Márquez’s words, Latin
America is “that boundless realm of haunted men and historic
women”; an “outsized reality”, it “nourishes a source of insatiable
creativity”, which is more apt than the “rational talents” in Europe to
represent the Continent’s magic realities, its stunning geography,
racially mixed population, violent politics, etc. (88, 89). García
The Fantastic 241

Márquez says that he “was able to write One Hundred Years of


Solitude simply by looking at reality, our reality, without the
limitations which rationalists as Stalinists through the ages have tried
to impose on it to make it easier for them to understand” (Fragrance,
59-60). Magic realism — and this is an important difference from
postmodern American fiction — thus circumvents the inevitable
problems of representation and signification that the North
Americans spend so much time to reflect upon and to interpret in
their forms of the imaginary.56
Yet John Barth writes in his essay “The Literature of
Replenishment”: “I myself will not join any literary club that doesn’t
include the expatriate Colombian Gabriel García Márquez” (1984,
195), whose One Hundred Years of Solitude he considers “as
impressive a novel as has been written so far in the second half of our
century and one of the splendid specimens of that splendid genre
from any century. Here the synthesis of straightforwardness and
artifice, realism and magic and myth, political passion and
nonpolitical artistry, characterization and caricature, humor and
terror are so remarkably sustained that one recognizes with
exhilaration [...] that one is in the presence of a masterpiece not only
artistically admirable, but humanly wise, lovable, literally
marvelous” (1984, 204). Why Barth values Márquez so highly
becomes clear in his finishing remark: Márquez is “an exemplary
postmodernist and a master of the storyteller’s art” (1984, 205). The
“storyteller’s art” and the range of the imagination are the key
characteristics that make Márquez a postmodern writer for Barth, but
Barth also mentions the “synthesis of [...] realism and magic and
myth”, i.e., a fusion of alternatives and contrarieties that also include
— and this is significant all postmodern writers —the “real”, and in
fact are the “real”. They are, or serve the “real” because they
search, in Lyotard’s words, “for new presentations [...] in order to
impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable” (1984a, 81).
But Barth is not the only postmodern American author who
was influenced by Márquez and other Latin American writers. In an
interview with Barthelme, McCaffery quotes Federman as saying
“that while Samuel Beckett had devised a means of taking the world
away from the contemporary writer, Márquez had shown writers a
way to reconnect themselves with the world”. Barthelme disagrees
“with Ray that that’s what Beckett has done; the Márquez portion of
242 From Modernism to Postmodernism

the comment seems more appropriate. I think they’ve both opened


things up, in different ways. Márquez provided an answer to the
question of what was possible after Beckett — not the only answer,
but a large and significant one. Robert Coover, among American
writers, seems to be doing something parallel, to good effect”
(LeClair and McCaffery 43-44). Coover himself notes that “[m]aybe
I think that all my fiction is realistic”, though the book’s “design is
born of, well, something else”, namely “[t]hat vibrant space between
the poles of a paradox” (67). Federman connects the two terms,
magic and realism, by setting them in the conditional, the if-form,
which he also ascribes to Márquez: “I read Márquez’s One Hundred
Years of Solitude as a novel written in the conditional, even though
the dominant tense in the book may not seem to be conditional. [...
T]here are writers today, and I would name Gabriel García Márquez
as the most important, who are reinventing the world for us, showing
us new possibilities, possibilities that anything can happen. These
writers lie, they exaggerate, they surrealize the real; and yet
somehow they captivate us, they make us believe in the world they
are reinventing and make us wish we could live in that reinvented,
magical world” (129, 138). What Márquez signals is

that we are going to have much more consciousness, much more


reflexiveness (in the sense of thinking), much more awareness in the novel,
with a lesser emphasis on the self. In this sense the novel will reconnect
with the outer world, not necessarily with reality, but with history —
history which is, of course, also a form of fiction, ‘a dream already dreamt
and destroyed,’ as John Hawkes once put it. I think this is already evident
in a number of recent novels, those of Márquez and other Latin American
novelists, such as Cortázar, Fuentes, and others. The Public Burning by
Coover is also a novel where the consciousness of a specific historical
moment is central to the text. I suppose Barth’s Letters is another example,
quite different in approach and style, but still a more conscious than self-
conscious novel (141).

Gass agrees with the judgments of his colleagues: “A great


many South American writers write rings around us. Infante’s Three
Trapped Tigers is a great book. I taught [Cortázar’s] Hopscotch
once. I’ll never get over it. Márquez, Fuentes, Lima, Llosa ... It is
always an exciting time to be a reader” (174).
The reactions of North American writers make clear that the
notion of magic realism can be defined in terms of what Borges and
Barth call “irrealism”, with a strong accent on “realism”, a realism
The Fantastic 243

that, however, opens up with its irrealism new spheres of reality.


Barth assigns to the experimental writers he likes, i.e., Borges,
Beckett, Nabokov, but also Calvino, Hawkes, Gass, Barthelme, “a
more or less fantastical, or as Borges would say, ‘irrealist,’ view of
reality”; and predicts rightly that “this irrealism — not antirealism or
unrealism, but irrealism — [...] is likely to characterize the prose
fiction of the 1970s” (Bellamy 1974, 4). Other postmodern writers
agree with this in-between status of fiction, its “irrealism”, for a
number of reasons. Sukenick, asked about his “concern for fantasy”,
answers that “there really is no difference between fantasy and
realistic action. It’s completely continuous — it’s all made up” (56),
and he wants to get people to recognize the nature of their fantasies.
Hawkes notes in similar terms: “I have an affinity with surrealism
simply because of the felt power of the dreamlike conflicts out of
which I try to make narrative fiction” (104).
Yet in spite of the “strange seductiveness” of the concept of
“magic realism” for the American writers, it is a model case of what
happens when too many contradictions invade a term. Since the
Eighties, the term magic realism has often lost its profile and is used
just like the term fantastic, in a very loose sense, to denote the
overwhelming presence of the imaginary in postmodern fiction. This
would make the postmodern American fictionists magic realists,
along with European authors such as Günther Grass, Italo Calvino,
Robbe-Grillet, D. W. Thomas, Milan Kundera, Robert Pinget. Or the
looseness of its sense would make magical realist literature implicitly
or explicitly ex-centric to European and North American mainstream
literature, and critics would instead focus on “postcolonial” literature
in general (see Slemon). This would include, in addition to the Latin
American writers (e.g., Borges, Márquez, Cortázar, Fuentes, Asturo,
Carpentier), the Indian novelist Salman Rushdie, writers from
Nigeria and Canada, as well as ethnic writers like Toni Morrison in
the US.57 Not writing from an ethnic perspective, Jameson offers
“the very provisional hypothesis that the possibility of magic realism
as a formal mode is constitutively dependent on a type of historical
race material in which disjunction is structurally present” (1992,
165). Theo D’Haen has suggested that “a consensus is emerging in
which a hierarchical relation is established between postmodernism
and magic realism, whereby the latter comes to denote a particular
strain of the contemporary movement covered by the former” (194).58
244 From Modernism to Postmodernism

The double problem with magic realism is how to define the fantastic
in relation to the real and their combination in relation to postmodern
fiction. Here no consensus has been achieved. On the contrary, a
number of critics have become very skeptical about the term’s
usefulness, though the phrase “magic realism” has undoubtedly given
the Latin American novel self-confidence and cultural authority.
Gonzáles Echevarría writes that the term has “neither the specificity
nor the theoretical foundation needed to be convincing or useful”. As
to the Latin American novel, it has “rarely gone beyond
‘discovering’ the most salient characteristics of avantgarde literature
in general” (111).

5.3. The Postmodern Fantastic Mode: Chaos and Abstraction,


the Void and the “Real”

The prominence given to the fantastic is a salient feature of


postmodern fiction. In fact the strategies of the fantastic, in Jean
Kennard’s words, “most of all characterize contemporary fiction [...]
Indeed in the 1960s they became the rule rather than the exception”
(10- 11). The fantastic mode, being in postmodern fiction the rule
rather than the exception and paradoxically both dissolving and
including the idea of the real, is the bearer of force, both of energy
and a dynamic multiperspectivism that I contributed to the aesthetic
attitude.59 The postmodern fantastic mode, in a spirit of playful
liberation, makes use of and exhausts all the possibilities that lie in
the span between tradition and originality, between exhaustion and
replenishment, as well as between freedom and anxiety.
Epistemological doubt and ontological uncertainty are paradoxically
both expressed and overcome by the forceful fantastic mode with its
double potential of deconstruction and reconstruction, of refusing
and confirming form and synthesis. The fantastic refuses the
synthesis of stasis, of the “real”, the “logical”, the “true”, yet
confirms the synthesis of opposites, of dynamis, of the infinite, of
change, and, most importantly, of the story which creates “spatially”
a productive synthesis as simultaneity of the actual and the possible,
of, in Barth’s terms, “realism and magic and myth” (1984, 204), and
generates “temporally”, conversely, a synthesis as difference and
“différance” (Derrida), as the continuing deferral of synthesis. The
ultimate aim of postmodern fiction is the paradoxical synthesis of the
The Fantastic 245

two, the “spatial” design of simultaneity that includes order and


debris and the “temporal” deconstruction of the design in the flow of
what Sukenick, Federman and others call (indeterminate) experience.
This is only possible in a fantastic, dreamlike state. Barth calls The
Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy “both relatively fantastical or
irrealistical” (Gado 132). For Sukenick the composition of fiction
results from “having a fantasy”; it is an “ongoing interchange
between the mind and the page” (1985, 8), which “organizes the
open field of the text” (13). “In fact, the act of writing it down is part
of the fantasy, that is, it’s like sleeping, is part of dreaming — the act
of writing is part of the fantasy” (Bellamy 1971, 8). Dream is a
metaphor for the possibility of the synthesis that cannot be a
synthesis in the actuality of the text, or at the most can be a synthesis
of incompatible contrarieties that both fill and fail to fill the gap,
cover and fail to cover the void, which is the ultimate formula of the
postmodern paradox.60
Sartre and Borges stand for the two aspects of the fantastic
— Sartre for the deconstructive dimension and Borges for the
reconstructive one, or at least mostly so. Sartre, referring to Maurice
Blanchot’s Kafkaesque Arminadab, outlines the decomposing,
enclosing, and depleting (modern) function of the fantastic (which
forms the background to the postmodern exultant fantastic mode).
Being concerned with the idea of (existentialist) meaning, he finds a
lack of it in the fantastic mode. The fantastic renders the image of the
universe as a universe of empty utterances, of means without ends.
Suggesting a modernist, Kafkaesque world of alienation, Sartre
notes: “The law of the fantastic condemns it to encounter
embodiments only. These instruments are not [...] meant to serve
men, but rather to manifest unremittingly an evasive, preposterous
finality”. “Labyrinths of corridors, doors and stairs that lead to
nothing, the signposts that lead to nothing, the innumerable signs that
line the road and mean nothing. In the ‘topsy-turvy’ world, the means
is isolated and posed for its own sake” (Sartre 1965, 66).
Borges, on the other hand, emphasizes the reconstructive,
creative side of the fantastic, the postmodern free play of
possibilities, the opening quality of the fantastic, which unlocks
closed systems, without, however, excluding anxiety and “an
impersonal, almost anonymous sadness” (Fic 141). He has remarked
that at least one of four elements must be present in a narrative to be
246 From Modernism to Postmodernism

considered fantastic: continuation of reality by dream (see the above-


quoted remark of Hawkes), a work of art within a work of art, travel
in time rather than in space and the presence of a doppelgänger
(Rodriguez Monégal 406). These elements help define the self not as
a unique, whole and closed entity that aims at stabilizing meaning
but as a multiple, flexible being that is always open to the other and
defines itself in terms of possibility. For Borges — and this is crucial
for the postmodern attitude — thinking, dreaming, and material
reality are equally “real”. He said to L.S. Dembo: “I wonder why a
dream or an idea should be less real than this table for example” (qtd.
in Stark 38). The narrative result of such a concept of continuity and
simultaneity of the real and fantastic is the definition of both the real
and the narrative worlds in terms of modalities, of perspectives in
which “the real was [only] one of the figurations of the dream”
(1968, 87). This “dreamlike” quality of reality and fiction is force,
dynamic movement; its form is the image of simultaneity, the ever-
forked path or the decentered and decoded labyrinth. The Force of
the imagination can manifest itself either by infinite expansion of the
world and the way to go (or infinite circling), or by infinite
contraction into “a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose
circumference is nowhere” (149-50). The fantastic is then the mode
of all modes, actually the basis of all other modes.
The alienating and the inspiring or “opening” functions of
the fantastic mode, its ambivalence and pluri-signification, create
tensions in the signification of the text, and these tensions generate a
“dramatic” potential of contrasting figurations, border crossings, and
liminal disruptions. Jameson writes that the fantastic presents “an
object world forever suspended on the point of meaning, forever
disposed to receive a revelation, whether of evil or of grace, that
never takes place” (1975b, 146). Contradicting the fixed idea of
reality and order, transgressing into alien territory, and exploring the
limits of desire, the fantastic does at least three things: (1) it includes
chaos into order; (2) it abstracts from the concrete situation and from
one-dimensional logic; (3) it faces the void and the gap.
(1) The fantastic interrelates order and chaos, and sets
defiant disorder against the closed systems of tradition and
convention. It creates indeterminacy, even non-signification, a
disjunction of the stable relation between word and meaning. While
modernist texts devise autonomous, self-sustaining, formally
The Fantastic 247

organized wholes that use chaos only as basic material on which they
impose aesthetic form, postmodern writers emancipate disorder and
chaos, have no hesitation to recognize, submit to, and make use of
chaos on its own terms. They accept chaos as a social or universal
given. With Camus, the absurd universe is dominated by “chaos”,
“chance”, and “equivalence” (54). In Borges’s “The Library of
Babel”, where the universe is pictured as a library, the narrator
speaks in a resigned tone of “the formless and chaotic nature of
almost all the books” (Lab 53). Yossarian, the protagonist of Heller’s
Catch 22, sees himself confronted by a grotesque world. It is
“working in chaos in which everything was in proper order” (111).
The writer Jack Gibbs says in William Gaddis’s novel JR: “Order is
simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality
of chaos” (20). In Pynchon’s story “Entropy” the apartment of
Callisto and Aubade is a futile and sterile attempt at (entropic) order
that fails because chaos finally breaks in from outside: “Hermetically
sealed, it was a tiny enclave of regularity in the city’s chaos, alien to
the vagaries of the weather of national politics, of any civil disorder”
(79). In Gravity’s Rainbow Slothrop wonders, thinking of chaos,
whether the sky perhaps is “where nothing is connected to anything”
(434). Vonnegut notes that “there is no order in the world around us,
that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead. It
is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that:
It can be done” (BC 210). Being unsuccessful in his modernist
attempts to uncover depth and find absolutes, the narrator of Max
Apple’s “Vegetable Love” realizes at the beginning of a new life
based on the acceptance of uncertainty and disorder that “starting
from himself and stretching right to the farthest astronaut hitting a
golf ball on the moon, there was a line of chaos as direct as the
plumb line that went through Ferguson” (OA 45). In Coover’s “J’s
Marriage” from Pricksongs and Descants, we read: “Finally, he
simply gave in to it, dumped it in with the rest of life’s inscrutable
absurdities, and from that time on began to improve almost daily”
(117).
Chaos can be seen in positive terms, as “maximum
information”, not as “an absence or a lack but as the source of all that
is new in the world” (Hayles 1989, 306, see also Gleick), including a
new order or a new potential of order. Chaos is the source of
creativity and as such is also a “formal” category. Chaos must be
248 From Modernism to Postmodernism

accepted or is even cherished because it allows desire and


imagination the possibility and creativity of a new beginning, a new
experience. Beckett writes: “there will be new form, and [...] this
form will be of such a type that it admits the chaos and does not try
to say that the chaos is really something else” (Driver 23). Most
postmodernists would concur. Hawkes, speaking of his novels “from
The Cannibal to Travesty”, notes: “in each there is a sense of closure
and then a sudden suggestion of expansion toward nothingness that
will once again or soon again be filled with chaos” (Ziegler and
Bigsby 175). Accepting the limitations of humanity, Sukenick
suggests that “chaos is easy AND USEFUL TOO” (Up 122). In
Snow White Barthelme speaks of the “trash phenomenon” (97), and
the “‘endless’ quality” and “‘sludge’ quality” (96), of “filling” and
“stuffing” the narrated situation in the text. For Kohler in Gass’s The
Tunnel”, our minds had moved the whole arc of the dial, from [...]
system to ... the chaos implicit in any complete account” (344): in
fact, “chaos is an order” (452). Federman and Sukenick radicalize the
case. Federman states: “I prefer discontinuity [...] I wallow in
disorder, my whole existence for that matter has been a JOURNEY
TO CHAOS!” (Tol ch. xx); and Sukenick remarks: “Reality has
become a literal chaos”. “I thrive on chaos” (DN 47, 100). Between
the two poles of chaos and (old/new) order the postmodern novel
wavers in the attempt to integrate them in the “experience”
(Sukenick) of author, text, and reader.
Again, science offers a frame of reference for the affirmation
of chaos. Chaos and catastrophe theory propagate new paradigms of
order and disorder that question the fundamental assumption of
traditional philosophy and classical physics, in which a chain of
causation and thus order always determines events. Instead,

[o]ur universe has a pluralistic, complex character. Structures may


disappear, but also they may appear. [...] The natural contains essential
elements of randomness and irreversibility. This leads to a new view of
matter in which matter is no longer the passive substance described in the
mechanistic world view but is associated with spontaneous activity. This
change is so profound that [...] we can really speak about a new dialogue
of man with nature. (Prigogine and Stengers 9)

If disorder and chaos are to be taken “seriously”, then form,


too, will have to adapt itself to the new relationship between order
and disorder. It is easier to translate this shift in paradigm into a work
The Fantastic 249

of the visual arts than into literature. For Beuys, form is what
transports the claim of “formless” matter within its form, and not
what takes “formless” matter merely as a condition of possibility for
the creation of form, which would then be imposed on matter as its
object. He seizes matter, so to speak, in its slimy, “aboriginal” state
of appearance, as felt, fat, or honey, not making them vehicles of
form but bringing out their own claim to form. In literature the
translation of chaos or disorder into the text is a more difficult task
because of the iconic nature of language and its inherent patterns of
order. In foregrounding the chaos factor in language and narrative,
the way postmodern fiction does, room is made for transgressive
movement on all levels. The unsayable, the non-conceptualizable, the
formless, the unknown and invisible, that which we have called
force, comes to the fore, in contrast to form. Fantastic deconstruction
and reconstruction serves the transgression of limits. The result need
not be only disruptive; it may create a new kind of balance that has
— in an extension of the concept — its own kind of “beauty” (see
Gass, Hawkes, and others).
(2) The introduction of chaos is complemented by a process
of abstraction. Both work together under the paradigm of
disappearance (versus appearance) in the process of deconstructing
old and exhausted forms and emptying the situation of traditional
fillings and orderings. “Emptying” the narrated situations of their
“normal”, “plausible”, “recognizable” hierarchies, relationships,
sequences, and “fillings”, reconfirms the fact that the aesthetic
system is “vacant”, “abstract”, not content-oriented, but builds the
stage for the organization of aesthetic worlds.61 Abstraction in fact is
a manner of negation, negation of accustomed notions of reality and
truth that now themselves have been revealed as abstractions. It is
also the negation of the (traditional) forms of the narrated situation,
of its being centered in the character. It opens the situation to force,
the dynamics of chaos and flow and the uncertainty of the gap and
the void. In contrast to the modernist texts of, for instance, Joyce,
Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, postmodern narrative abstraction
does not only affect the character. It is “abstracted” because it comes
to represent attitudes, aspects of experiencing the world. In post-
modern narrative, abstraction now reaches the narrated situation
itself.62 Freed from the domination of plot and character, after illusion
and identification have been negated or at least heavily restricted, the
250 From Modernism to Postmodernism

abstracted situation now serves as the ground-situation of fiction, to


be filled at random. Pynchon’s Stencil speaks of “this abstract entity,
The Situation”. Since this concept of the abstract situation forms the
epistemological basis of Pynchon’s narrative method and that of his
postmodern colleagues, it is worth quoting the passage here in full:

Stencil gritted his teeth. Oh, The Situation. The bloody Situation. In his
more philosophical moments he would wonder about this abstract entity The
Situation, its idea, the details of its mechanism. He remembered times when
whole embassiesful of personnel had simply run amok and gibbering in the
streets when confronted with a Situation which refused to make sense no
matter who looked at it, or from what angle [...] He had decided long ago
that no Situation had any objective reality: it only existed in the minds of
those who happened to be in on it at any specific moment. Since these
several minds tended to form a sum total or complex more mongrel than
homogeneous, The Situation must necessarily appear to a single observer
much like a diagram in four dimensions to an eye conditioned to seeing its
world in only three (V. 173-74).

While the fourth dimension with Henry James, for instance in The
Spoils of Poynton, is a matter of “appearance”, of the integrating
atmosphere of a place that speaks of the people living in it in the
present or the past, it is here a matter of disappearance of order, and
of the appearance of disorder and chaos. This disappearance affects
all elements of the situations. Time loses its structure and is
abstracted into a continuous present. Mobility and the quest signify a
kind of vacuity and nothingness, an abstraction, not a goal-oriented
movement. Profane, who in V. belongs to the Whole Sick Crew, is
displaced in the streets, a rootless wanderer, who, in his own words,
has learned nothing from his travels up and down the streets. They
fuse into a “single abstracted street” that runs from nowhere to
nowhere, offering no opportunity for projects, actions, stabilizing
relationships. It is “[t]he street of the 20th Century, at whose far end
or turning — we hope — is some sense of home and safety. But no
guarantees [...] But a street we must walk”. Space yields up its
stability, is metamorphorsized. Things separate, do not connect. The
subject-object relation does not produce coherent, “probable”
images; it remains abstract, or rather abstractable, transformable at
will. The character is abstracted into the subject, the subject into its
mental capacities, finally into a mere voice (cf. Barth, “Menelaiad”).
The self-reliant action is replaced by the outer, non-rationalizable,
The Fantastic 251

“abstract” event. The abstraction of the situation, as the quote from


V. implies, leads to (and is the result of) an uncertainty of
epistemological, emotional, and ethical values, and personal goals;
and this uncertainty affects also the meaning potential of the
situation. If “no situation had any objective reality and existed only
in the minds of those who happened to be in on it at any specific
moment”, “and if these several minds tended to form a sum total or
complex more mongrel than homogeneous”, then the meaning-giving
process, especially the symbolic reference, is abstracted, too. As we
saw above, symbolic meaning is “aestheticized” in postmodern
fiction and imposed on the vehicle, so that a tension between vehicle
and tenor develops, and the relation between the two becomes
arbitrary. Barth chooses as symbols for the description of the
storytelling process “abstract” geometric figurations like the spiral,
the circle, the Moebius strip, the labyrinth.
The story is abstracted, too; it just disappears from the text,
erasure and abstraction being here the same thing. Federman notes
that Beckett in The Lost Ones “went as far as you can go without
story”; “he had reached the erasure of story completely. Maybe Gass
or Coover or Barthelme will get to that point and also go all the way
with it. But for me The Voice in the Closet is as far as I want to go in
this direction” of story-lessness. “Many contemporary writers have
wanted to go as far as we could go with this erasure, the same way
that painters did when they went to the limits of abstraction” (LeClair
and McCaffery 150). However, Federman notes, “Beckett went
abstract and eventually won the Nobel-Prize” (151). Because the
notions of reality and truth are withdrawn in postmodern fiction, in
fact abstracted from the concrete worlds, the themes are also
abstracted; it is no longer necessary to mediate them by the logic of
plot or character as a psychological entity. No more is the quest for
identity the thematic matrix; the abstract forces of relativity, irreality,
possibility, discontinuity, indeterminacy, entropy, etc. take its place.
After the character is decentered, mental capacities, perception,
reflection, emotion, and desire are foregrounded in their own roles,
for the most part now independent of the unity of character.
To be sure, the abstraction of the situation, of space, time,
movement, and character, as well as the erasure of the logic of the
story can be welcomed as a chance of liberating the imagination.
Sukenick notes that “abstraction frees fiction from the
252 From Modernism to Postmodernism

representational and the need to imitate some version of reality other


than its own” (1985, 212). In fact, “[t]he mind orders reality not by
imposing ideas on it but by discovering significant relations within it,
as the artist abstracts and composes the elements of reality in
significant integrations that are works of art” (171). Barthelme wants
to abstract language to make it independent of individual con-
sciousness: “I find myself moving toward an increasingly abstract
language which has the bad effect of leaving more and more readers
confused and unhappy. I greatly regret that, but I can’t help it”
(Ziegler and Bigsby 45). Federman generalizes this tendency: “[W]e
were all at one point or another in our careers working our way
toward the erasure of language” (LeClair and McCaffery 150); and
Gass generalizes even further: “As an artist you are dealing with a
very abstract thing when you are dealing with language (and if you
don’t realize that, you miss everything)” (160). The fact that the
dialectic of the concrete and the abstract is without synthesis,
however, causes self-doubt. Barthelme notes: “Possibly this degree
of abstraction can’t be done. A second possibility is that it can be
done but shouldn’t be done” (Ziegler and Bigsby 45).
The tendency towards abstraction obviously creates at least
two problems and a new challenge. First, this abstracted situation is
paradoxically always concrete. It is not abstracted from concreteness
but from the ordering schemas of concreteness and must be “filled”
with the elements of space, time, character, and action, at least as
negatives, for language because of its iconic character is not suited
for abstraction, which makes for tension between abstraction and
concreteness. John Barth underlines this aspect, but differentiates
between literature and art: “I believe literature’s not likely ever to
manage abstraction successfully, like sculpture for example. [...]
Well, because wood and iron have a native appeal and first-order
reality, whereas words are artificial to begin with, invented
specifically to represent [...] weld iron rods into abstract patterns and
you’ve still got iron, but arrange words into abstract patterns and
you’ve got nonsense” (LF 112). Second, the loss of regulative
schemas leaves the arrangement of the concrete details without pre-
established form. The result of the “mongrel” status of the situation
is that “the details of its mechanism” render no “sum total”
(Pynchon); they in fact render all relations contingent.63 But if there
is no hierarchy of order left and relations are contingent, which
The Fantastic 253

relations are to be chosen? Obviously those that include chaos in


order, the insignificant in the significant, and those that do not
impose ideas from outside but rather discover the “significant
relations within it [the text]” (Sukenick). These relations originate
from the dynamics of contrast and contradiction and from the
emptiness of the in-between, the created spaces for new mediations
(Beuys, Barth). They cannot unfold out of order because they
embrace disorder, not as a mere contrast (since in such dualities one
pole is always privileged) but as an independent force with equal
rights. If one does not want to privilege the category of order, there is
one way out: the relations have to be abstract, abstract however in a
new way that is defined by the possible, the virtual. Abstraction here
occurs both from the actual and the rational schemes of regulation.
In fact, this new abstraction battles the old abstractions, the
regulative rationalizations, the exclusive categorizations, and the
one-dimensional logic of traditional and modern narrative and
philosophical texts, in order to attain new space for the force and
multiform of new creations, for the imaginary, by abstracting from
the abstraction of preformed patterns. This creating of new space is
done by creating tension between the concrete situation and the
categorizing abstract pattern, a tension that is the basis of irony,
parody, or the comic mode which target the old regulative
abstractions; in Coover’s words: “The abstractions are empty, aren’t
they? Even so, they are useful. It is easier for me to express the
ironies of our condition by the manipulation of Platonic forms than
by imitation of the Aristotelian” (Gado 143-44). Barth says he is
eager “to try to abstract the patterns” and by following it to “parody
the patterns” (Bellamy 1974, 13). Imitating a pattern implies
abstracting a pattern. He has many of his protagonists imitate a
pattern, thus abstracting it from the lived situation that makes the
traditional pattern ideological and false. He places the characters
within this tension, and writes what he calls “ideological farce” (qtd.
in Noland 20). As early as in The Floating Opera and The End of the
Road, abstract concepts clash with concrete situations and make
futile the attempts of characters to provide a canon of true ideas and
rules. When the characters think and act or attempt to act according
to such ideological, abstract principles of behavior, they lose their
vitality, their capacity for change, for surprise and development.
Contrasting situation and thought, Barth creates a life-threatening
254 From Modernism to Postmodernism

malady with the telling and comic name of “cosmopsis”:64 a paralysis


of the will, which can take on different grades of intensity and is
made thematic in both The End of the Road and The Sot-Weed
Factor. It makes Ebenezer Cooke in The Sot-Weed Factor unable “to
relate to the situation”, because he cannot make up his mind, and
adheres to the ideology of innocence in defiance of the demands of
experience. With respect to philosophy, cosmopsis is a parodical
abstraction of Camus’s absurd consciousness.65 With respect to
character, it is an abstraction and parody of self-reflexivity; and with
respect to awareness, it is an abstraction and inversion of romantic
and modern epiphany (cf. F. McConnell 132-33).66 Missing in many
cases is what one might call authenticity, in the sense of a “true”
interaction between character, thought pattern, and situation. In the
“Bellerophoniad” from Chimera, Zeus says to Polyeidus: “By
imitating perfectly the Pattern [i.e. the sequence of situations] of
Mythic Heroism, your man Bellerophon has become a perfect
imitation of a mythic hero” (Ch 308), i.e. of the mythic pattern.
Concomitantly, the friend of the spermatozoon, the
narrator/protagonist in “Night-Sea Journey”, could only describe
“[t]he ‘purpose’ of the night-sea journey [...] in [imitative]
abstractions: consummation, transfiguration, union of contraries,
transcension of categories” (LF 10). The loss of subjectivity leads to
the loss of the subject, and the loss of the subject leads to extreme
forms of abstraction. For Menelaus in Barth’s “Menelaiad”, the result
of his confusion about love and identity is that “[p]lace and time,
doer, done-to have lost their sense” (LF 160), and he degenerates into
a mere mechanical voice, which is “all there is of him. When I’m
switched on I tell my tale, the one I know, How Menelaus Became
Immortal, but I don’t know it” (127). Another story in the same
collection, “Autobiography: A Self-Recorded Fiction”, contains the
words of a dialogue between a disembodied taped voice and the
machine, the voice being sick of its purposeless, abstract life and
wishing to turn off the machine, which as a disembodied voice it
cannot do, though the end of the tape finishes also the “life” of the
voice.67
Finally, meta-reflection and self-interrogation are
abstractions, too. Barth’s story “Title” starts: “Beginning: in the
middle, past the middle, nearer three-quarters done, waiting for the
end. Consider how dreadful so far: passionlessness, abstraction, pro,
The Fantastic 255

dis. And it will get worse, can we possibly continue?” (LF 102) In
Barth’s LETTERS, the result of meta-reflection is the computer as
writer. It is the key instrument for the abstraction of rational
patterning. The novel actually becomes patterned as a “fictional
imitation of the analog computer, demanding that the protagonist and
the reader perform the high-speed, simultaneous, and collaborative
processes necessary in ‘the great multiple field of impinging
informations’ where we live now” (LeClair 1982, 264). Bray’s
computer-constructed NOVEL develops through a reduction process
into NOTES and then into NUMBERS. It constitutes a new genre
that Barth calls “numerature”, and loses in the process of abstraction
and patterning all the flexibility and blanks of temporality in the
futile and ridiculous attempt to establish the “absolute type”, the
“Platonic Form” (Let 32). Here again parody comes to the fore, in
this case parody of the modern attempt at perfect form, as well as
Barth’s self-parody, the parody of his own obsessions with forms and
patterns and numbers, for instance the transformation of the Freitag
triangle into a logarithmic spiral as a structural model for Chimera.68
In the construction of LETTERS and its plots, in the excessive
employment of mechanical patterns and systematic categorizations,
used even for the designations of love, the abstraction of pattern
operates as pattern that leads to nothing. The “masque of the
burlesque”, i.e. the comic mode, insures that the planted clues (in the
manner of an [anti]detective novel) lead to nothing in the end. All
that can be said for sure is that there are — as the title implies —
letters on the page, since there are only “Arresting But Meaningless
Patterns”. This is even so in the love-relationships of Ambrose
Mensch, whom the author calls his “alter ego and aesthetic
conscience” (Let 653), and who, by losing his “initial view of
things”, is marked by a “paralyzing self-consciousness” (165, 652).
He is obsessed with patterns, i.e. abstractions, and divides the status
of his love-relationship with Germaine Amherst according to “the
sequence of his mature prior connexions with women” (Let 386) into
six stages, so that only the seventh, never accomplished stage would
break the pattern and make him able really to love Germaine as a
“self-existent” person (768). The incidents of the plot form an
endless network of “Portentous Coincidences” (384). Both patterns
and incidents, the abstract and the concrete, play against and confirm
256 From Modernism to Postmodernism

one another in their (playful) meaninglessness/meaningfulness —


which constitutes another form of the paradox.
Like Barth, Pynchon is a master at abstracting and parodying
patterns. In V., the name of the protagonist, “Stencil”, already
suggests the obsessive need to produce “patterns and designs”,69 in
his case the pattern of the quest. It is abstracted by emptying the goal
of the quest: Lady V. dissipates in the multiplicity of shapes and
might be an invention, as well as the origin and cause of the quest,
which remain without satisfactory motive. Patterns and designs in all
of Pynchon’s novels are abstracted from the situations and their
direct evidence. Purposelessness is an abstraction, and thus Bogine’s
aimless rides on the subway back and forth through New York are an
abstraction insofar as they do not have what travel generally has, that
is a destination, a beginning, a middle and end. Hawkes, as men-
tioned above, is concerned in his novels with the abstraction of
design from debris (Travesty). Elkin, in books like Boswell: A
Modern Comedy, The Dick Gibson Show, and The Franchiser,
creates characters from the ranks of the average who are lacking in
personal substance. They feel to be nothing but voices abstracted
from the conceptions of ordinariness. In William Gass’s “Mrs.
Mean”, from In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other
Stories, the narrator, who lives by voyeuristically participating in the
lives of other people, calls the woman he observes Mrs. Mean: “I
don’t know her name. The one I’ve made to mark her and her doings
in my head is far too abstract. It suggests the glassy essence, the
grotesquerie of Type; yet it’s honestly come by, and in a way it’s
flattering to her, as if she belonged on Congreve’s stage” (106). By
following the maxim: “signs without are only symbols of the world
within” (133), the narrator “abstracts” himself into his own
projections, his obsessions with sexuality, death, bodily decay.
In fact, both the strategy of shaping thoughts in contrasting
patterns and the counterstrategy of deconstructing these shapes of
reflection in favor of fragments of thought and mere verbiage
produce abstractions of thought, disconnected from the subject
(which becomes ineffable and unnamable), from the object (that has
no longer the status of the “real” or the true but appears only as
mental image) and from the relations of causality and logic. Leaving
behind the task of dramatizing the limits of the thinking self,
reflection joins imagination, indeed becomes a vehicle of the
The Fantastic 257

imagination and its expansive energy. The text strives towards a


meta-level of “aesthetic liberalism”, which recognizes no pre-
established precepts or rules and attempts to reconcile the dualities
by “transform[ing] the ceaseless tensions between the various modes
of modern discourse into the conditions of possibility” (Cascardi
1992, 302). With the loss of the sense that reflection is conditioned
by the specific relation between subject and object comes the risk of
emptiness, of repetition and exhaustion.
(3) Chaos and fictional abstraction turn against exhausted
organizing principles, against useful but arbitrary patterning that
impose order on chaos, trying to assuage. The postmodern writers
unravel these preformed systems of myth, thought, story, developed
out of nearly unlimited elements and possibilities of combination, by
their attitude of play that liberates the suppressed alternatives,
deconstructs, and reconstructs pre-given tales and forms of tales
(fairy tales as in Barthelme’s Snow White or Coover’s Briar Rose or
mythic tales as in Barth’s Giles Goat Boy or Chimera, etc.). They act
with the conviction that stories are arbitrary compositions of
situations, and that single units of the story can be treated, combined,
evaluated, and perspectivized quite freely. Familiar stories can be
told from unfamiliar points of view by rearranging and transforming
the pre-given components as in Katz’s Creamy and Delicious,
Coover’s “The Brother”, “J’s Marriage”, and “The Gingerbread
House” (from Prick Songs and Descants) or Calvino’s “The Castle
of Crossed Destinies” (see McCaffery 1982a). The latter calls this
kind of story “‘cubist’ in structure” [33]). One story thus holds and
gives birth to many stories in a kind of dissemination of fictional
worlds; the story can be multiplied indefinitely by unbounded
creativity. Literature appears to be a treasure house of formal designs
that can be manipulated at will. Calvino writes: “Yes, literature is a
combinatory game which follows the possibilities implicit in its own
material, independently of a personality of the author” (qtd. in
McCaffery 1982a, 24). For Calvino the poet is a kind of Jester or
Fool “who perform[s] his task [...] to show [...] that every straight
line conceals a crooked obverse, every finished product a jumble of
ill-fitting parts, every logical discourse a blah-blah-blah” (qtd. in
McCaffery 1982a, 36).
Yet though the fantastic as principle and method of
transformation, driven by the energy of play, seems to have
258 From Modernism to Postmodernism

established itself as a self-serving principle, drawing on the infinite


resources of the store house of fictions, it in fact, battles against the
gap, the blank, the void, and nothingness that is the really real and
cannot be avoided. Julio Cortázar, the Argentinean postmodern
author, notes: “nothing is missing, not even, and especially,
nothingness, the true solidifier of the scene” (Blow 111). Hawkes,
speaking of “tragic irony” as a “romantic impulse constricted or put
under pressure”, writes: “I should think that the romantic impulse is
in itself a duality, or holds in balance the power of unlimited
possibility and the nothingness that is the context of all creativity”
(Ziegler and Bigsby 178). Fiction, according to Barth, is “a shield
against a kind of nothingness”; it is, in fact, an “exorcism of
nothingness, of the vacuum” (Ziegler and Bigsby 36), or of what
Coover calls in The Universal Baseball Association “the final
emptiness” (239). Nothingness is the really real that the fantastic
both confronts and covers, presenting against it, hopefully,
exuberantly, self-confidently, but also doubtfully, the fictional
actuality of “something” imaginary and fantastic. Barth writes: “This
is the final test. Try to fill the blank. [...] Efface what can’t be faced
or else fill the blank. With words or more words” (LF 102). The
fantastic mode demonstrates with semiotic excess and the interface
of semantic emptiness and “fullness”, of concreteness and
abstraction, the limits of reason and “meaning”, paradoxically both
opening the gap and refilling, covering it. In Foucault’s terms, the
fantastic is the result of “a form of thinking in which an interrogation
of limits replaces the search for totality and in which a movement of
transgression replaces a movement of contradictions” (1963, 767, my
transl.). In fact, what the postmodern authors do is to activate and
radicalize an immanent feature of the fantastic mode. It always
contains, as Bessière notes, “the affirmation of emptiness”; it
paradoxically both creates and covers absence by its presence,
denotes “a severance of connecting lines of meaning [... a] gap
between signifier and signified” (qtd. in Jackson 37), and it plays
with it. The limit the fantastic challenges, and attacks, or plays with
and succumbs to is the limit of possibility-thinking.
The status and function of the real are among the most
difficult problems of postmodern fiction. Obviously, the status of the
world in fiction is actual or possible, but not real. The real can only
enter fiction as the idea of the real and the idea of the real is multi-
The Fantastic 259

faceted. It is subject to rationalization, belief, and ideology, is not


merely the real, but is always framed as the real by preconceptions,
expectations, desires. All the interviews with postmodern writers
confirm the fact that they reject the concept of the real. Barth says in
an interview: “Since I don’t know much about Reality, it will have to
be abolished [...] Reality is a drag” (Enck 11). But, as mentioned,
narrative has to accept the idea of “true” or elemental reality, which
is force, force of experience, of storytelling, of the imagination, and
of the void. Force confers to narrative the authority necessary to
reject false forms, patterns, and conceptualizations in the name of
“truth”. Nothingness is the strongest force of reality and truth; it is
real and questions the status of every fixed something. But then also
certain regulating conceptions of the world are “real” or “true” in the
sense that they are necessary for orientation in the world, even if they
appear “under erasure” (Derrida). Coover notes, “the fiction writer is
a truth teller. [... ;] the writer is still trying to penetrate reality, not
escape from it. He approaches it with what Borges calls “‘that lucid
innocence’: eyes open for the worst. I think of myself in that sense as
a realist, and I imagine so do the others, though of course: new
realities, new forms” (Ziegler and Bigsby 83). The concern with
“truth” and “reality” restricts the scope of play. What play has
overstepped — both the conceptions of “reality” and the
instrumentality of the schemas of consciousness in general — remain
present in absence. Play not only challenges (discarded) reality and
the categories of understanding but is challenged by them, too. Play
renders everything possible, even its own (self-)deconstruction by, as
it were, playing itself out of the play, dissolving itself or becoming
“serious”.
Just as there are parallels between literature and
poststructuralist philosophy in making play the key term for the
activities of the imagination, there are such parallels also in the
questions raised about play’s all-encompassing power. Foucault
notes the paradoxical position of the person living in the world, the
curious fact that he or she can only grasp it in its (playful)
representation. The subject, “from within the life to which he entirely
belongs and by which he is traversed in his whole being, constitutes
representations by means of which he lives, and on the basis of
which he possesses that strange capacity of being able to represent to
himself precisely that life”, i.e., “reality” (Foucault 1970, 352). And
260 From Modernism to Postmodernism

though the subject faces, in Lacan’s terms, a cybernetic playing field


of “floating signifiers”, an “incessant sliding of the signified under
the signifier” (1977, 154), there is the “real” behind language. The
text “desires” the real, which, however, is nothing but language and
its gaps. The “pure real” becoming identical with the unconscious is
something that subverts, forms, insists on the void. In terms of the
basic, paradoxical absence-presence figuration, the “nothing” is
indeed the something “there waiting, for better or worse, but waiting”
(Lacan 1997, 65). One can also argue in terms of language. Generally
speaking, language “is both destructive of the thing [and reality] and
allows the passage of the thing onto the symbolic plane, thanks to
which the truly human register comes into its own” (Lacan 1991a,
219). Play has its limits because it threatens to become merely
repetitive and empty: “this ‘sliding-away’ (glissement) conceals what
is the true secret of the ludic, namely, the most radical diversity
constituted by repetition in itself” (Lacan 1981, 61). Derrida finally
emphasizes that the codes of realism and centrism are such that, even
when they are deconstructed by the textual matrix, they still persist,
transforming language into a (centered) world. He notes the
“irrepressible desire for such a [transcendental] signified”; this leads
to “the desire to restrict play”; this desire “is [...] irresistible”:

Can one not affirm the nonreferral to the center, rather than bemoan the
absence of the center? Why would one mourn for the center? Is not the
center, the absence of play and difference, another name for death? [...]
But is not the desire for a center, as a function of play itself, the
indestructible itself? And in the repetition or return of play, how could the
phantom of the center not call to us? It is here that the hesitation between
writing as decentering and writing as an affirmation of play is infinite.
This hesitation is part of play and links it to death (Writing 1978, 297).

In spite of the deconstruction of the concepts of the real, the real


remains present not only as elemental force but also as form, as the
ideas of metaphysics, of center and structure, and of nothingness, of
death, of the void. According to Democritus, whom Beckett quotes in
Malone Dies, “Nothing is more real than nothing” (Moll 193). The
fantastic thus defines itself in the text not only as disorder against
order but also as the “irreal”, as enforcer of the possible, as
complementary to the actual, in fact as part of the “real”, which
The Fantastic 261

appears always “under erasure”, as a “minus function” (Lotman), as


the ineffable. The form of the interface of the actual and the possible,
and therefore the signum of both the fantastic and the “real”, is the
paradox.

5.4. Strategies of Negation and Re-creation

The fantastic mode is an art of negation, also of ironic self-


negation; in other words, it does not deconstruct, but also
reconstructs drawing on the generative potential of fiction. It
engenders disappearance and new appearance or re-appearance. The
negation of norms, connections, and coherences results in what we
have called situationalism, which is the basis of the fantastic.
Situationalism is the restrictor or transformator of the thematic and
psychological codes and the generator of the fantastic mode, which,
on the basis of the “liberated” fictional situation, can work freely,
unhampered by the relational system and the conventions of fiction.
As mentioned, situationalism is the consequence of a historic
development of negation in the novel from the nineteenth to the
twentieth century, of the negation of totalizing units like plot,
character, morals, etc. In the postmodern deconstructive turn, the
dominance of the social frame of the situation, character, and
action/event, over the “natural” frame, space and time, is also
negated. This leads to the dissolution of the centered structure of the
situation, usually focused on the character and events, causality of
the sequence of situations, which is guaranteed by character and plot.
What happens between deconstruction and reconstruction is both a
playful, formal “dramatization” and “de-dramatization” of the text,
reaching in the extreme case the point where, in Piaget’s words,
“everything is connected with everything else [so that] nothing is
connected with anything else” (1928, 61), which, again, is a
formulation of the postmodern paradox that builds on the interaction
of connection and separation, something and nothing. The techniques
of fantastic deconstruction and reconstruction are manifold. A list of
some of the most obvious ones offers an overview of strategic
possibilities with which the fantastic worlds are built. Some of the
examples have already been mentioned before but appear here in
another, systematic context of deconstruction and reconstruction (the
variations of plot we will discuss later).
262 From Modernism to Postmodernism

Narrator and Narration: (1) The narrated situation is


blended into the situation of the narrator. It thereby abolishes any
formal demarcation between story and discourse, with the result that
there is no longer a clear-cut difference between the mediated and the
mediator, between a fictional character and the narrator, between
narration and reflection on narration. A new space is created in-
between all narrative instances. The narrator just like the reader can
enter the story at will, become a character, and blur the borderlines
(Barth, Lost in the Funhouse; Federman, Double or Nothing, Take It
or Leave It; Sukenick, Up, The Death of the Novel and Other
Stories). An extreme case occurs in Federman’s Take It or Leave It,
where the fact that the narrator and the hero of the first-person
narrative are the same character is linguistically and comically
dramatized:
But in case you guys get confused in the course of this twin recitation with
the me and the he
& the I and the He
& the me now and the he then
& the he past and the me present
(he past in the hole
me present on
the platform
let me make it quite clear once and for all lest WE forget it
(here & there & everywhere)
I am here [alone]
He is there [together we are]
as one are we not / multiple though single / I + HE = WE or WE-I = HE
pluralized in our singularity
me telling him
him telling me etc.
thus again should you guys confuse me for him as I confuse myself with
him and in him and vice versa let me assure you you may be confused or
you may not even care. (ToL)70

(2) In addition to the narrator’s situation, the writer’s appears


as incorporated into the text (Barth, Lost in the Funhouse,
LETTERS). Not only are the characters artists who discuss the
problems of a writer, interposing statements about the medium,
literary codes, and the conventions of narrative (often in an ironic or
parodic way) that appear in the narrative itself, thus disturbing the
“good” continuation of the narrative flow and “dramatizing” the
creative act, but the author himself as the creator of writer can appear
within the text (Federman, Double or Nothing, The Voice in the
The Fantastic 263

Closet; Sukenick, Up; Out). The writer may enter the text and help
his character and “leave” again to take care of his own business
“outside”. Or the characters may visit the author. In Sukenick’s Up,
the real-life models of his characters come to him to congratulate the
author Sukenick on the completion of his book: “Now Sukenick is
holding a champagne glass in the air and doing his own crazy dance
to Greek bouzouki music. He must be drunk already. Live it up Ron
boy, the book’s almost over” (324). In Barth’s LETTERS, the author
writes letters to his former characters from “within” the book, asking
them to allow him to use them again in his new novel, and gets
answers from them, stipulating conditions for their reappearance.
Thus the fictional material from former novels is recycled, making
the characters “doubly” fictional in their position in-between the
books. In Sorrentino’s novel Mulligan Stew, which incorporates a
novel-in-progress by Tony Lamont and the diaries of a character in
Lamont’s novel, this character, Halpin, is aware of the “job” he has
to do as a character in the novel and is dissatisfied with his role.
(3) The exchangeability of reference systems (of scientific,
psychological, sociological, metaphysical viewpoints) is used to
make each perspective relative in its truth value, and to render
equally fantastic both the application of a single perspective and the
fusion of a number of perspectives. The fictional point of view again
is in-between, referring always to the other (Pynchon, V., Gravity’s
Rainbow; Reed, Mumbo Jumbo).
Disruption of Situational Logic: (1) The situation ceases to
have subjective, i.e., existential meaning for the inner self as an
authentic expression of character. The protagonist in Elkin’s The
Dick Gibson Show “had no character” (254): his character is his
“voice” (251). Together with the dominance of character the situation
loses its center. Hawkes says that the most he can do is “deal with the
components, the parts, the inadequate fragments of human nature”
(Bellamy 1974, 102); and one of Barth’s characters notes: “You say
you lack a ground-situation. Has it occurred to you that that
circumstance may be your ground-situation?” (LF 115).
(2) In the narrated situation one or all of the situational
constants, space, time, character, action/event, are deformed and
fantasized, the borderlines transgressed. The house in which the
characters stay, in Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew, ends in nothingness.
The boundaries between the animate and the inanimate are sus-
264 From Modernism to Postmodernism

pended in Pynchon’s V.: Lady V. finally turns out to be only a


collection of mechanical parts (See also Barthelme; Pynchon,
Gravity’s Rainbow, The Crying of Lot 49).
(3) The multiplication of what is possible and probable in a
given situation results in the presentation of one situation in a
number of versions of equal actuality and probability, without any
temporal or ontological priority residing in any one version (Coover,
“The Babysitter;” Federman, Take It or Leave It). The elimination of
a single situational logic can take such a radical form that, for
example, a character in a falling elevator is able to step out of it at
any time before it crashes to the ground, thus abolishing the border-
line between actuality and potentiality, and demonstrating the
multiplicity of imaginative possibilities in contrast to the limitations
of the actual (Coover, “The Elevator;” Federman, Take It or Leave It;
Nabokov, Bent Sinister, Look at the Harlequins). The multiplication
of narrative endings removes its definitive character and transforms it
ad infinitum so that the reader can choose an ending or, for that
matter, no ending (Brautigan, A Confederate General from Big Sur;
Barth, Lost in the Funhouse).
(4) The dislocation of situational details from one another
and their emphasized autonomous status serve to deny any
combinational order or rational, emotional hierarchy of elements and
values; every detail thus is the “other”, stands in-between possible
schemes of coherence. In Brautigan’s A Confederate General from
Big Sur, we are told about what will happen to the things a woman
owns after she is dead: “They’ll put them inside a celery root and
then discover a way of making battleships out of celery roots and
over the waves her things will travel” (41; cf. also Brautigan,
Hawkline Monster; Barthelme, The Dead Father, “The Indian
Uprising;” Sukenick, Out, 98.6). Various situations can in fact be
folded into and disrupt one another in their stability as well as in their
continuity (Barthelme, “The Indian Uprising”).
(5) An existential situation of pain and injury is reduced to a
purely “experimental” and “artificial”, coolly detached and “ab-
stracted” demonstration of brutality, while the expected human
reaction is withheld in the text. The writer leaves out psychological
motivation, does not make an attempt at signification, and thus
denies the reader rational explanation and the possibility of
The Fantastic 265

understanding and humanizing the situation by identifying with the


victim (Hawkes The Lime Twig; Sukenick, 98.6).
(6) The narrated situation is isolated from time-sequence and
a narrative continuum. It does not only lose its temporal connections,
as in modernism, but also its “logical” connection with the preceding
and following situations. The composition becomes serial, which
means that the “horizontal”, temporal, and logical continuity is
broken up. Again, as Federman claims: “the elements of the new
fictitious discourse (words, phrases, sequences, scenes, spaces, etc.)
must become digressive from one another — digressive from the
element that precedes and the element that follows. In fact, these
elements will now occur simultaneously and offer multiple
possibilities of rearrangement in the process of reading” (1975, 11).
Thus, in the most radical case, the sequential logic is abandoned in
favor of an interchangeability of situational units (Pynchon,
Gravity’s Rainbow; Brautigan, In Watermelon Sugar; Federman,
Take It or Leave It; Sukenick, Long Talking Bad Conditions Blues).
This implies also the deconstruction of the patterns of plot and
history, about which more will be said later in connection with time
and succession.
Contrast Between Situation and Linguistic Representation:
(1) The simple, seemingly matter-of-fact mode of linguistic
representation is used to contradict and complicate the reader’s
response to an unusual narrated situation, which thus becomes
irrealistic. This method of detachment goes together with the attempt
of the “minimalists” among the postmodern writers to “cleanse” art
of “expressionism” and thus to bar the thoughtless projection of the
inner into the outer. This kind of narrative method leaves many
empty spaces between the given details and deprives the situation of
its fullness, reducing the fictional world to a “diagram” (Brautigan,
Trout Fishing in America, The Hawkline Monster; Barthelme, Snow
White, The Dead Father).
(2) The counterstrategy is to expand a situation into the
fantastic by metaphor, thus making use of the unlimited possibilities
of transforming and abstracting meaning from the concrete gestalt
and circumventing the long-practiced tradition of giving the reader
clear formal signals of the situation’s specific significance. In
Brautigan’s A Confederate General from Big Sur, the narrator says:
“Elaine stared at the waves that were breaking like ice cube trays out
266 From Modernism to Postmodernism

of a monk’s tooth or something like that. Who knows? I don’t know”


(154).
(3) The expansion of the seemingly fixed meaning of a
phrase (e.g., “trout fishing in America”) into an infinity of
imaginative contexts shows the domination of the imagination over
merely conventionally formalized relations between signifier and
signified and of accepted language patterns, and to stimulate the
imagination of the reader by breaking through the horizon of
expectation (Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America).
(4) The alphabetical order may be used as “shaping
principle” for the ordering of a number of meditations, as in Gilbert
Sorrentino’s Splendide-Hotel where he writes: “One must find some
structure, even it be this haphazard one of the alphabet” (75, 14). On
the first pages the reader finds entries under the headings,
“ABORTION”, “AKTEDRON”, “ANDERSON, LANE”,
“ANDERSON, VALERIE” or “ANGRIE, EUGENE”. In Abish’s
Alphabetical Africa, the letters of the alphabet are the matrix of
composition and theme, the text being divided into fifty-two sections,
each marked by and limited to a letter from the alphabet, from A to Z
and then from Z to A. The letters give the text a “constrictive form”
(Klinkowitz 1977, 68), for example the letter “A”: “Africa again:
Albert arrives, alive and arguing about African art, about African
angst, and also, alas, attacking Ashanti architecture, as author again
attempts an agonizing alphabetical appraisal” (1-2). The narrating
process can deteriorate to a playing with words, as in the following
cases: “Oh I wish there were some words in the world that were not
the words I always hear!” (Barthelme, SW 6) “In fact there can also
be more words words!” (Federman, Tol, n.p.) “I’m going to finish
this today, the hell with it. I’ve had enough of this. I’m just playing
with words anyway. What did you think I was doing? Just playing
with words ga-ga-ga-ga-ga- ga-goo-goo-gig-geg-gug-gack”
(Sukenick, Up 329).71
(5) “The mindless unfolding of verbiage” (LeVot 55)
suspends the comprehensibility of syntactical patterns, impedes the
iconic and referential qualities of language, and is simply the other
among the referentialities of linguistic significance, thus defusing the
concretization of a fictional situation in the reader’s mind. Federman
says: “When I discovered Céline I found myself confronting pure
verbal delirium, and when I write fiction [...] deliriousness is a
The Fantastic 267

crucial aspect of it”; and he admires “Sukenick’s linguistic


distortions”, which “seem very natural” (LeClair and McCaffery
149). The deconstruction of language leads to the abandonment of
the story; according to Federman’s telling phrase, “we were all at one
point or another in our careers working our way toward the erasure of
language” (150). In order to de-rationalize language, in Barthelme’s
The Dead Father, even the experience of death is played with in a
jumble of words that includes nonsense in sense:
AndI. EndI. Great endifarce teeterteeterteetertottering. Willit urt. I
reiterate. Don’t be cenacle. Conscientia mille testes. And having made
them, where now? what now? Mens agitat molem and I wanted to
doitwell, doitwell.[...] Endjoying the endthusiasm which your endtente has
endgendered.[...] AndI replied that Old AndI not so interested in maidens
as formerly. Quantum mutatus illo! [...]
Reiterateandreiteratethattothebestofmyknowledgeandbelief I was Papping
as best I could like my AndI before me palmam qui meruit ferat. [...]
Endeavoring to meet ends. To the bicker end. Endocardial endocarditis [...]
Let’s have a party. Pap in on a few old friends. Pass the papcorn [...] Don’t
understand! Don’t want it! Fallo fallere fefelli falsum! [...] I was
compassionate, insofarasitwaspossibletobeso. Best I cud I did! Absolutely!
No dubitatio about it! Don’t like! Don’t want! Pitterpatter oh please
pitterpatter (213-15; see also Barthelme, “The Sentence”).

The fantastic is the negation of the ordinary, the expected,


and used-to, of the traditional idea of the “real”, and the true.
Negation and its “tearing asunder” here finally have become self-
serving, a mere generator of both vital and destructive human
energies, of the unlimited desire for movement and incessant change,
of the precipitous urge to imagine, formulate, and consume every
possibility and every human potential. The binary mechanisms of
exclusion have been rejected as arrogant, even “terroristic”, and
rigorous moral antitheses have been suspended in an attempt to
expand experience and aesthetic form.72 Flexibility is gained in con-
necting the paradigms of knowledge and judgment and opening them
up to another meaning, a more radical stance. This elasticity makes
room for the non-classified, the intractable, and also for new
evaluations and play with the new. In this sense, the fantastic and its
methods of negation are the operators of the principle of the possible,
set against that of the actual. As argued above, “possibility-thinking”
(Musil) and narration may be able to fill the gap and cover the void,
268 From Modernism to Postmodernism

but they cannot abolish either of them because they are the “realistic”
and “existential” underside of postmodern fiction.
6. The Space-Time Continuum

Negation, abstraction, and fantastication work together in


establishing new fields of creative possibilities that affect the
discourses of space and time and their continuum. Space and time are
the basic coordinates of the “natural” frame of the situation, while the
social frame is formed by character and action/event. All orientation
in time presupposes an orientation in space and vice versa. Though
any conceivable experiential or fictional situation always interrelates
the elements of space, time, character, and action/event, these
constitutive elements form separate categories with characteristics of
their own that can be isolated. The literary discourses of space and
time are necessarily selective; they present and accentuate some
features more than others. The selection and combination of these
features change over the course of history. In narrative are changed
the detailing, the profile, the evaluation, and function of space and
time. The interrelation between space and time, however, is indis-
soluble, since time, having no substance of its own, needs a mediator,
namely space. Time does not flow along without a concrete
substratum, and mental time also needs sensory images for memory
or forecast. Space, on the other hand, is not given without time,
time’s protean profile and value. Space and time interrelate with
value. Value is invested in place and objects, in duration and change.
Stasis and dynamis stabilize or alter the surface and the core of
things, characters, conditions, and the world in general. The poles of
appearance and disappearance are in constant struggle with one
another. Their dialectic forms one of the paradigms of postmodern
fiction.
In the history of time and space conceptions, Kant plays an
all-important role, as he supported and made prevail the absolutist
theories of time and space (space and time as absolute categories a
priori). In accordance with such notions, the writers of the nineteenth
century understood time not so much as subjective-existential time
but as “objective” and collective time of the empirical world. It was
experienced and theorized in its various, intersubjective models of
transitoriness and permanence. Time was the always available, all-
encompassing dimension of being, reaching into past and future, and
structured by the idea of progress. Only at the end of the nineteenth
270 From Modernism to Postmodernism

century did these absolutist conceptions come to be refuted and


replaced by notions of relativity that constituted the theory of space-
time, time being the fourth dimension of space. In an historic lecture,
Hermann Minkowsky asserted in 1908: “Henceforth space by itself,
and time by itself, are doomed to fade away”. “Nobody has ever
noticed a place except at a time, or time except at a place” (“Space”
297-98). The novel at the end of the nineteenth century puts this idea
into practice and makes the mental interrelation of space and time
more intimate, which then becomes the hallmark of modernism (see
Joyce, Ulysses, Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse,
Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom). At the beginning of modernism, space
(plus things in space) and time combine into an (animated) space-
time continuum, or in the words of Wyndham Lewis: “chairs and
tables, mountains and stars, are animated into a magnetic
restlessness, and exist on the same vital terms as man. They are as it
were the lowest grade, the most sluggish of animals. All is alive; and
in that sense, all is mental” (433).
In a further important development that is basic for the
handling of time in postmodern fiction, theoretical physicists like
Stephen F. Hawking in A Brief History of Time have extended the
idea that time on all its dimensions is a mental construct, not only
“subjective” mind-time but also “objective” clock-time. Both are
constructs of the mind. Their separate discourses make clock-time
regular, uniform, quantitative, irreversible, and make subjective
mind-time relative, multiform, reversible, and organized into past,
present, and future through memory and forecast. Since the
distinction between clock-time and mind-time is nothing but a
convention, it can be easily overturned and played with. According to
contemporary theory, there is no reason why “the arrow of time”
under certain circumstances could not rather point from the future to
the past rather than from the past to the future. Again the postmodern
writers follow suit. Sukenick writes that “[r]ealistic fiction pre-
supposed chronological time as the medium of a plotted narrative
[together with] an irreducible individual psyche as the subject of its
characterization” and “the ultimate, concrete reality of things as the
object and rationale of its description”; for him and his colleagues
“all of these absolutes have become absolutely problematic” because
“[r]eality doesn’t exist, time doesn’t exist, personality doesn’t exist”
(DN 41). One need not go so far in the deconstruction of time, but as
The Space-Time Continuum 271

Peter Osborne writes: “what we call ‘time’ is the reified result of an


ongoing process of temporalisation, part of the active (self) pro-
duction of a particular kind of being, rather than a merely given form.
For Heidegger “[t]here is no nature-time, since all time belongs
essentially to Dasein” (Osborne 36-62, 41).
Not time but the interpretation of time (and space) and its
variability are the crucial factors. The interpretations of time can
make use of all the traditional notions of time, but only as conceptual
possibilities of conceptualizing, and not as “real” states of time. The
conceptualization of time generally employs three elemental models,
which in our later section on time will be the guiding lines of
analysis. Time is seen as (1) linear/progressive time (personal,
social, historical, structured in terms of cause and effect, of origin,
process and goal, of beginning, middle, and end), or as (2) circular/
cosmic time of nature (universal, life-oriented, repetitive), or, finally,
as (3) subjective/mental time (experience, memory, expanded
connections between past, present, future; duration, giving a person
identity; fusion of subject and object in the moment of being,
revelation or vision, anticipation of death). These are of course only
positions on a scale with many transitions, overlappings, and quite
different evaluations. Time is — implicitly or explicitly — linked
with belief, with ethics, psychology, politics. Questions arise and
have to be answered: “Is personality essentially given from the outset
[...] or does it change in essential and unpredictable ways [...] Does
character development resemble the way a seed develops into a
plant? Does it merely ‘unfold’ or does it truly ‘become’? Can we
make ourselves different or is such change itself prescribed in ad-
vance?” (Morson, Narrative and Freedom 1994, 2). Or: “what is
history? What purpose does it serve? Does it express the truth? If so,
how? If not, what good is it?” (Price 1999, 1). The fact that these
questions cannot be answered “objectively”, in spite of all scientific
progress, makes any given answer the result of ideology; and the
various ideologies war with one another, establishing a further (4)
combinational time model, a paradigm of struggling concepts of time
that change and that appear under changing dominance relationships.
The rivalry between concepts of “objective” clock time and
subjective mind time is key.
If time needs to be constructed, it can also be deconstructed.
The structure of time is restricted. With the loss of defining human
272 From Modernism to Postmodernism

contexts, beginnings and endings may disappear. In disappearing,


they become unfathomable and deprive the middle of time of the
basics of orientation, namely origin and goal. If time cannot be
structured from the beginning and cannot be fathomed in respect to
its process or progress, the last resort is still the end, which can be
orchestrated in terms of what Frank Kermode calls the “concord
fiction” of apocalypse. “Concord fiction” combines the idea of an
ending and that of a new beginning. The paradigm of an ending that
does not give hope for a new beginning is entropy. Human life and
the “strange, eventful history” of humankind enact a continuous
“struggle against entropy” (Coover, PB 238). When, finally, the
“human” structuring and interpretation of time both lose their fixed
points of reference, i.e., the beginning and the end, the various modes
of time seem to disappear into mere contingency. The latter defines
the middle without beginning and end in terms of the accidental.
Projected into writing, the accidental turns into randomness and
thwarts the attempts at structuring time by beginning and end, by the
process of meaning-giving. Barthelme sees the greatest difficulty in
the beginning of writing. In “The Dolt” he writes: “Endings are
elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin,
to begin, to begin” (UP 65). The protagonist/historian in Gass’s The
Tunnel is not so much worried about beginnings: “[e]ndings, instead,
possess me ... all ways out” (Tun 3). Pynchon’s books are examples
of the combination of the three paradigms, apocalypse, entropy, and
oceanic undifferentiation in the middle, all three suggesting states of
affairs that include the ineffable. Postwar Germany, called the
“Zone” in Gravity’s Rainbow, is an example. It is characterized by
the overall deconstruction of time concepts by war, by the fact that
“[t]he War has been reconfiguring time and space into its own
image” (257), its image being apocalypse, waste and entropy, and
undifferentiation.
Space, or referential space, is always related to time through
change and movement. It contains places and things; it is structured
as time is by the perspective of an experiencing subject. Just as the
discourses of time are shaped by the relations between chronological/
mechanical and subjective/mental time, and the interaction between
present and past, present and future, the discourses of space are
organized in terms of relations between inside and outside, breadth
and depth, nearness and distance, closure and openness, finiteness
The Space-Time Continuum 273

and infinity, horizontal and vertical dimensions. People are simply


oriented in time, and they are obviously oriented in space, which puts
them in a specific place. From the experiencing subject’s point of
view, space opens from the near to the far in ever widening horizons.
The manifestations of space, of spatial relations and objects (as of
time) are not neutral, but are perspectivized by the relationship
between the subject and the object. They are perceptual, emotional,
cognitive, utilitarian: they are determined by attitudes that are
theoretically separable, but that in practice combine and interrelate
because all space is experienced space, and experience includes the
activity of several if not all human faculties, though of course priority
may be given to the one or the other.
For modernist writers the existential relationship between the
human being and space becomes crucial. With the failing of the
ideologies of progress, the isolation of the individual and the retreat
of communication in the twentieth century, narration comes to
emphasize ways of relating to the world that are more elemental than
those of rationality; fiction activates what one might call bodily
consciousness, thus following belatedly Carlyle’s dictum in Sartor
Resartus (derived from Kant): “That the Thought-forms, Space and
Time, wherein, once for all, we are sent into this Earth to live, should
condition and determine our whole Practical reasonings, conceptions,
and imagings or imaginings, — seems altogether fit, just, and
unavoidable” (197). The novel, now less concerned with society,
morality, and progress than with the self and its isolation and its
existential quest for identity and truth, confirms what Ernst Cassirer
wrote at the end of the 1920s: “there is no accomplishment and
creation of the mind that does not make reference in one way or
another to the world of space, that does not as it were attempt to
make itself at home in it. For a turning towards this world the first
necessary step is towards concretization, towards the perception and
definition of being. Space, as it were, forms the general medium in
which the spiritual production first can ‘establish’ itself, can bring
itself to its first forms and gestalts” (Cassirer 174-75). Karl Jaspers
notes that the processes of consciousness are represented in spatial
terms: “Pictorially we imagine consciousness as the stage on which
individual spiritual phenomena “come and go” (qtd. in Iser 1993,
336). And Maurice Merleau-Ponty speaks of a “relation of totality”.
People have to the place they live in, a relation negotiated by the
274 From Modernism to Postmodernism

body: “We said space is existential; we also could have said,


existence is spatial, that indeed it opens itself to something ‘external,’
and it does so in such an essential way, that we can speak of a
spiritual space and a world of meanings and the objects of thought
which constitute themselves in this world” (1962, 341).

6.1. Spatial Form

The increasing structural weight of the spatial element in


modern fiction has given rise to a discussion of the “spatialization”
of the novel. However, the sense of this phrase (as that of the term
“spatial”) is ambivalent. It does not refer to the spatial referentiality
of the text so much as to a special kind of structure of the text. The
term serves to separate a “spatial” order of the text, which
emphasizes simultaneity and cross-references, from temporal and
logical/causal orders, which accentuate sequentiality. In the
traditional novel the temporal and causal orders are intimately
related; in the modernist novel this relation is questioned, even
suspended as falsity. In Roland Barthes’s words: “Everything
suggests, indeed, that the mainspring of narrative is precisely the
confusion of consecution and consequence, what comes after being
read in narrative as what is caused by. In which case narrative would
be a systematic application of the logical fallacy denounced by
Scholasticism in the formula post hoc — ergo propter hoc” (1977,
94). The loosening, challenging and finally dissolving of the implicit
and explicit connections between the temporal and causal orders
deprives the flow of time of a firm and integrating, logical, and
“objective” patterning and makes the structuring of narrative de-
pendent on psychological and ideological factors. The
subjectivization of time according to psychological needs as the last
resource of structuring the temporal process does not only set the
inner significant perception of time against the outer “mechanical”
process of time (as, for instance, in Joyce’s Ulysses, or Virginia
Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse); once the unity of
time and causality is broken up, other spatial and psychological
causalities step into the foreground: the causality of the environment
in naturalism and that of character in modernism. In the first case
place and things take on the function of reflectors of social
The Space-Time Continuum 275

circumstances, in the latter the role of providing an area for the


projection of the inner states of the mind and soul onto the outside.
In the radical cases of modernism, the deterioration or
abolishment of causality turns into anti-causality or irrational
causality (Kafka), and out of the loss of temporal order and
coherence arises a vacuum that is filled by what has been termed
“spatial” order, which is complex and requires a greater interpretative
effort from the reader. Roman Jakobson analyzes this complex
spatial order, in Todorov’s words, as “symmetries, gradations,
antitheses, parallelisms, etc”(1981, 47).73 Joseph Frank in his well-
known essay “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” states “that
modern literature, exemplified by such writers as T.S. Eliot, Ezra
Pound, Marcel Proust and James Joyce, is moving in the direction of
spatial form. This means that the reader is intended to apprehend
their work spatially, in a moment of time, rather than as a sequence”
(Frank 225). For documentation he uses an early example of the
“spatialization of form”: the market-place tableau in Flaubert’s
Madame Bovary. Here “the time-flow of the narrative is halted:
attention is fixed on the interplay of relationships within the limited
time-area. These relationships are juxtaposed independently of the
progress of the narrative; and the full significance of the scene is
given only by the reflexive relations among the units of meaning”
(Frank 231). Proust and Joyce have taken over this method, and have
rendered spatial form prominent in the novel, and have further
developed it towards a spatialization of time, which is the result of
“continual reference and cross-reference of images and symbols
which must be referred to each other spatially throughout the time-
act of reading” (Frank 232). This is a method of composition that
requires the recipient to read the book in terms of separation and
connection.
Sharon Spencer and others have elaborated Frank’s ideas,
using, like Frank, the literal and figurative meaning of “spatial”
without differentiation. Spencer states that “in the novel [...] there
exists an observable struggle to subdue the patterns suggested by
time in its accustomed sense to those existing in its new spatial
sense”. She studies those novels “that embody approximations of
time-space fusions achieved by various ingenious structural
procedures”, by “the principle of juxtaposition”, using either “a
single exclusively maintained and often unusual perspective” or “a
276 From Modernism to Postmodernism

great variety of perspectives simultaneously focused upon the


subject”, (xx-xxi).74 She distinguishes types of novels according to
the use of these principles. For our argument we will maintain the
difference between “referential” space (referential of course only in
terms of the fictional world), on the one hand, and “spatial” form,
i.e., the creation of cross-references based on the working of
simultaneity in the narrative (and reading) process, on the other. The
literal and figurative meaning of space entails two different narrative
strategies that should be separated analytically, even though they mix
in the concrete text and have the same origin and cause: doubt and
distrust in the “good” continuation of time and in the teleology of
metaphysical and social order.75 But “spatial” form also needs more
clarification as to its function in postmodern fiction, since it is not
employed for the creation of meaning in the traditional or modernist
sense. It is in fact formalized and relativized in a contrasting
synthesis of simultaneity and seriality.
Just as space is characterized by stasis and simultaneity, time
is distinguished by dynamis and succession. Stasis and dynamis,
simultaneity and succession are different but correlated aspects of the
space-time continuum that constitute any given situation. Stasis and
dynamis, simultaneity and succession are intimately related to
separation and connection. There is no connection without
separation. Connection requires that there be, first of all, separateness
and separability of elements, which then can be connected in a
meaningful way or be set to defy such connectability. In the
continuous process of construction and deconstruction characteristic
of postmodern fictional strategies, separation and connection play
against one another to create of juxtapositions, gaps, blanks,
linguistic disorder, verbal patterns, the scattering of words on the
page, all those strategies that dissolve dualities of thought and value,
and stress the “wordiness” of literature. The dialectic process of
separation and connection in itself constitutes a meaningful pattern
built on the elements of space (separateness) and time (connection).
If the division, the lack of unity between separation and connection
are emphasized, the good and easy continuation of the semantic order
during the reading process is fragmented or negated. Both mere
fragmentation and mere fusion bring about a loss of recognizability
of the narrated situation, of logical continuity and meaningful
signification; they invest the situation with a quality of “irreality”, of
The Space-Time Continuum 277

the fantastic, of abstraction from the “full” and “regular”


representation of the situation. This fragmentary form radically
differs from the conventional “scripts” of situations that the reader
stores up from experiencing and categorizing life; but this
fragmentation is here paradoxically presented as the truly life-like
experience, as the “true” condition that includes disorder in order,
discontinuity in continuity, force of destruction in the form of
construction. Federman writes in Double or Nothing: “Variety that’s
the spice of life Though after a while it gets repetitious A guy must
vary if he wants to survive Must invent Let it happen by itself Let the
damn thing shape itself by itself Create new forms New noodles
Improvise anything Improvise on a puff of smoke QUICKLY And
keep going” (5). Sukenick reassuringly turns the argument around,
looks at its other side, continuity: “It doesn’t matter where you start.
You must have faith. Life is whole and continuous whatever the
appearances” (ESS 7). We will return to the phenomenon of
simultaneity and succession later.

6.2. Time

6.2.1. Linearity, Event, Depth, and Narrative

Since narrative focuses on continuity and development, its


basic element, at least since Lessing, has been considered to be
time.76 The concepts of time are historical. In postmodern philosophy
and narrative, they are multiple and contradictory. Deleuze, for
instance, recognizes two different aspects of time, of which the
second is a rejection of the first. He refers to the Stoics who call the
two forms of time chronos and aion. Chronos, chronological time, is
inseparable from space and matter. Its logic of sequence is the basis
of the logic of cause and effect. Aion is the unlimited continuum of
incorporeals, the source from which presence ceaselessly flows. It is
pre-individual and impersonal; it is, as it were, a temporal vacancy
from which everything that exists takes its origin. It is the time of
production and creativity and is thus the time of freedom and of the
imagination, of art and its imaginary worlds, its intensities, and its
“events”. It is also the time of art’s “singularities”; “these sin-
gularities [...] are more us than we are ourselves, more divine than
the gods, as they animate concretely poem and aphorism, permanent
278 From Modernism to Postmodernism

revolution and partial action”. It is our task “to make pre-individual


and nonpersonal singularities speak” (Deleuze 1990, 72-73). Going
beyond the systematic aspects of time and narrative, Deleuze
approaches open time via desire (of which more later), just as Leo
Bersani does in his book A Future for Astyanax: Character and
Desire in Literature. In order to deal with open time, Derrida, as
mentioned, develops the concept of “différance”, which stresses the
aspects of movement and the deferral of time. Sukenick takes up the
two aspects of aion for his own theory of fiction. Time on the one
hand is “empty”, marks the reservoir of possibilities, of drives and
energies of force. It is “the fundamentally open whole as the
immensity of the future and the past” (ESS 46). But it is also the time
of singularities, “the ultimate existence of parts, of different sizes and
shapes, which cannot be adopted, which do not develop at the same
rhythm” (Out 101).
The task of art’s force to foster “permanent revolution”, to
create “pre-individual and non-personal singularities”, and to keep
open the uncategorizable “source” of all movement sets off poetry
against narrative, narrative being bound by its greater length to
linearity (the development of the one out of the other), and forming a
pattern of surface relations. As is evident in the remarks of
postmodern authors about plot, character, scenery, and theme, there
is a certain suspicion even among postmodern writers of narrative,
the fear that their medium favors chronos, order and a measurable
whole, i.e. closed time, over aion, open time and the continuity of
process and movement — a suspicion that is strengthened by
philosophers like Heidegger and Derrida. Heidegger, Deleuze, and
Derrida, reaching beyond the linear surface appearance of time,
speak of the “event as a moment of depth”, the event of “Being”,
which interrupts and counters mechanical, chronological temporality
with the existential and elemental dimensions of time. Heidegger
favors poetry because “[i]n ‘poetical’ discourse the communication
of the existential possibilities of one’s state-of-mind can become an
aim in itself, and this amounts to a disclosing of existence” (1971,
205). This disclosure of existence is “the letting happen of the advent
of the truth”. It is an “event” that cannot be “proved or derived from
what went before” (1971, 72, 75). Lyotard emphasizes the im-
ponderableness of the event: “Complete information means
The Space-Time Continuum 279

neutralizing more events. What is already known cannot, in principle,


be experienced as an event” (1991, 65).
The representation of this existential event, in which
something like Being (Heidegger) in whatever form, discloses itself,
would be impeded by the linearity and immanent causal logic of
narrative. As Levinas states: “If we are to understand the problem of
Being, our first philosophical step consists [...] in not ‘telling a story’
— that is to say, in not defining entities as entities by tracing them
back in their origin to some other entities, as if being had the
character of some possible entity”. Narrative is apt to confirm us in
our “tranquillized supposition” (1990, 26, 223) of inauthentic,
homogenizing life, while poetry can draw us out of it in the authentic
event of Being. For Levinas, “being” in narrative “has a non-
dialectical faculty, stops dialectics and time”. Narrative, however,
turns events into “situations”. The images and situations of
narrative do not have “the quality of the living moment which is
open to the salvation of becoming, in which it can end and be
surpassed” (139, 141). Lyotard, arguing against the “grand nar-
ratives”, i.e., the grand projects of Western society, is skeptical about
narrative in general, too. In poetry, event and desire, the opaque and
obscure, as well as the figural, constantly disturb the order of
discourse, impose discontinuity on language. Diachronic narrative,
however, does not shatter chronological time and linguistic order, but
is on the contrary contained by them, by succession and its ir-
reversibility, by the clarity and distinctness of the narrative system,
which is indifferent to the indiscernible, inarticulable, to the event,
which is the emergence of the other.
Yet the perspective that privileges the “Event” is an
essentializing one: it gives a one-sided view of narrative. A much
more positive picture emerges (also with Derrida) if, instead of the
absolute and its vertical axis, the horizontal axis and the continuum
of time are made the locus of the infinite, and the multiplicity of
situations, the attachment to particularity and the constant deferral of
meaning can create the site of that infiniteness. Rorty thus comes to
affirm “the novelist’s taste for narrative, detail, diversity, and
accident” (1980, 73), the countering of abstraction and essentialism
in narrative. Yet the argument changes when the difference between
poetry and narrative prose is blurred, too. Lyotard and Deleuze note
that the “event” can never be grasped and represented, that discourse
280 From Modernism to Postmodernism

produces only a simulacrum of the event, and that only the modes of
representation are different, that they can be both narrative and lyric,
because they show the event anyway in a “deconstructed sense”, in
fact “designate something other which resembles it” (1991, 24).
Postmodern fiction does not aim at the “event” as a moment
of depth. The “event” in postmodern fiction is the invasion of outer,
mysterious forces, as we will show later. The reign of “a new
depthlessness” in the New Fiction causes the “waning of affect”, the
(partial) suspension of the modern feeling of anxiety and angst, but
also, according to Jameson’s rather ill-humored and disapproving
listing, the rejection of “at least four other fundamental depth
models”:

the dialectical one of essence and appearance (along with a whole range of
concepts of ideology or false consciousness which tend to accompany it);
the Freudian model of latent and manifest, or of repression [...]; the
existential model of authenticity and inauthenticity whose heroic or tragic
thematics are closely related to that other great opposition between
alienation and disalientation, itself equally a casuality of the poststructural
or postmodern period; and (4), most recently, the great semiotic opposition
between signifier and signified, which was itself rapidly unraveled and
deconstructed during its brief heyday in the 1960s and 1970s (Jameson
1992, 12).

In the same way the postmodern writers shun depth, they


also attempt to avoid linearity. In depth there is only the void; in
linearity lurk unavoidable causal relations and the danger of closure.
Yet they can escape neither the void nor sequential time, a condition
that makes for struggle and paradox. John Barth warns against too
much deconstruction since “[a]s individuals we still live in calendar
and clock time” (Bellamy 1974, 16). All attempts to deconstruct time
in postmodern fiction start out with chronological time, in order to
state the meaning of time, the loss of time, the end of time, and the
void. Postmodern fiction employs linear, historical time, cyclical,
cosmic time, psychic-existential time and the simultaneity of
concepts of time and deconstructs them at the same time in order to
mark the ontological disruptions of the imaginative worlds.
As mentioned, the three models of time will provide the
framework for the following discussion. These particular temporal
categories form rubrics under which phenomena like plot, suspense,
succession, the ordinary and extraordinary can be analyzed. In
The Space-Time Continuum 281

contrast to society and its thinking in terms of progress, (cyclical)


Life evolves as an alternative frame of reference, as a value system
placed against the linearity of history, and the notions of beginning
and end. Life offers a way out of anthropocentric thought, out of
rigorous categorical distinctions, out of the burden of history and the
feeling of alienation. Of course, the postmodernists allow none of
these conceptions of time a kind of supremacy that would establish a
hierarchy of perspectives and values. They are interrelated, overlaid,
opposed, relativized, played with, but are always present in terms of
the actual or the possible and the multiplicity of the manifestations of
time.

6.2.2. Linear Time as Historical, Teleological, Mechanical Time

History is not a natural given but a human construct, as are


all other perspectives of time or space.77 Unlike God and nature,
whose conceptual statuses are eternity or duration, history, being not
immutable but subject to change, allows not only the construction but
also the deconstruction of its status as a stable meaning-giving
principle. Four types of history writing have been distinguished; they
provide traditional, exemplary, critical, or genetic accounts of the
past.78 Historiography can bridge the gap between past and present by
pointing out the “historicity of consciousness” in general, as Dilthey
did (1958, 261), and the “‘incapsulation’ of the past in the present”
(Collingwood). However, the fundamental problem that poses itself
to all views of history is whether the past is to be presented and
evaluated from the standpoint and the interests, the conditions, media
and communication forms, the knowledge and expectations of the
present or from those of the past.79
If the perspective is that of the past, of its unique experiences
and expectations and their lasting effect, the historic perspective may
proceed from a deterministic influence of the past on the present, a
cause-effect relationship, an “inner cohesion” (Gervinus; von Ranke,
qtd. in Uhlig), a “stream of necessity” (Burckhardt 1955, 11)
between past and present. Some historians speak of “a sense of
reverence for the pastness of the past” and its literary works (Watson
19). A reverence for the past can also spring from the idea that the
present is bound to relate to the past, to its otherness and range of
possibilities. Heidegger speaks of the necessary “de-actualization of
282 From Modernism to Postmodernism

the present” and of history as a “return of the possible” (1959, 391).


In general, choosing the viewpoint of the past for the historical stance
means choosing the perspective of objectivity and truth.
When the present becomes the focal point of attention, and
the historian does not wish to constitute a one-dimensional logic of
origin, causality, and telos, (literary) history can be seen as providing
exemplary and genetic meaning. The past becomes the prehistory of
the present; it is studied for its “usefulness” or “relevance”. Leavis
remarks: “It is only from the present, out of the present, in the
present, that you can approach the literature of the past” (68). Unlike
the viewpoint of the past, which focuses on truth, the adoption of the
present perspective for the historical account entails a conscious
distancing, a strictly selective and manipulative viewpoint (and the
abandonment of a meta-position, an integrative metaphysical
perspective). The past is arranged according to patterns of function
and applicability; it is seen as a world of possibilities and thus is
aestheticized. This approach is quite obvious in modernist literature.
There the aestheticization of history is an aesthetic (artificial)
reconnection of history and meaning, as we will show later.
The aestheticization of history in an aesthetic design is the
result of the modern disjunction of history and (rational) meaning; it
is also the attempt at their selective and aesthetic re-conjunction (see
Uhlig 485). The aesthetic or literary use of history stands in a
dialectical relationship to epistemological issues. The important point
to be made is that these epistemological problems, if they are
radicalized, end in an aestheticization of history too. From an
epistemological position of relativity, at least four problem areas
open up. They can be circumscribed as follows:
(1) The task of the (literary) historian to give an account of
the past is first made difficult by the double requirement of
understanding it and of explaining it (for the difference between
“understanding” as the method of history, and “explaining” as that of
the sciences, see Dilthey 1950; see also Riedel): to revitalize it in
empathy and at the same time explicate it. Benedetto Croce argued
that we cannot understand bygone times “if we do not recreate and
reanimate in ourselves the needs that brought them about” (4). The
historian may seek the “rebirth of the past” (Cassirer 1972, 178), but
the question arises of how to achieve this reanimation of the past
when the present is so different — a difficult enterprise with doubtful
The Space-Time Continuum 283

results at best. For this experiential “fusion of horizons” (Gadamer)


knowledge of the past is obviously necessary.
(2) This knowledge, however, is made problematic by
epistemological doubt, doubt in the possibility of resurrecting a past
period and its culture by cognitive means, even if based on the most
thorough analysis of the sources. Hegel mentioned the
incompleteness of the past, Feuerbach and Marx thought this
incompleteness an incentive to falsification and mystification, and
Nietzsche spoke of suppression and lies; these thinkers thus “brought
to a close the unity of dialectical thought with the idea of totality”
(Kurrik x). It has become apparent by now that the choices made in
the evaluation of the past are determined by personal inclinations,
historical circumstances, and the system of thought the historian
adheres to, and thus are ideological. Depending on his or her
conceptual stand, the literary historian might conceive of the
development of literature and the arts as progress (see Adorno 1972;
1969; 1984; Henry James 1957); or as decay (Lukács 1959).
(3) Epistemological doubt has been radicalized into the
conviction that the relationship between present and past is always
conceptual and constructivist, and that concepts do not call forth the
one and only “truth”, but are fictitious. The mediation between the
particular and the general appears to be merely speculative and
subject to complementary views and to change. Thus Adorno,
emphasizing the problem of the hermeneutic circle, argued that the
particular, i.e., the non-conceptional, is “inalienable from the con-
cept” and “disavows the concept’s being-in-itself”, though for him
“thinking without a concept is not thinking at all” (1990, 137, 98).
(4) Epistemological doubt and the crisis of universal reason
have not only affected the truth status of history but have also opened
a gap between history and theory. Hegel criticized subjectivity as the
basis of modernity and attempted to reconcile reason and history on
spiritual grounds, by seeing their “double movement” as coming
dialectically together in a totality, an Absolute Spirit or Reason,
manifesting as well as realizing itself in history. Thus he was able to
explain and accept the phenomenon of the new in terms of progress,
and at the same time dialectically mediate the new with the old and
vice versa. In this way Hegel, however, established only “the self-
proximity of infinite subjectivity” (as Derrida, following Nietzsche’s
“there is no ‘totality’” [1968, 711], and Heidegger remarked [1976,
284 From Modernism to Postmodernism

24]), leaving open a number of questions about the origin and the
rationality of the new, whose sources for Foucault, for example,
remain unfathomable by reason. Karl Löwith criticized Hegel’s
synthesis of reason and history on the grounds that it was an “attempt
to translate theology into philosophy and to realize the Kingdom of
the Lord in terms of the world’s real history [...] as a ‘priest of the
Absolute’” (58). He instead saw the all-encompassing principles of
duration and constancy in history in human (physiological and
psychological) “nature”, in the anthropological constants. One can,
however, turn the problem further around by foregrounding function
rather than reason or nature. Hans Blumenberg, recognizing the
contradictions in modernism but defending the “legitimacy” of the
modern age, attempts both to save continuity and to explain its
transformative effect in history by setting function in place of
substance and speaking of historical change as a “reoccupation” of
(constant) cultural positions, as a provision of new answers to old
questions, but also as the source of new problems arising from those
answers.
In spite of attempts to save the concepts of continuity and
universal reason (see Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of
Modernity), other contemporary theorists have emphasized the
contradictions in modernism, among them the dichotomy of history
and theory. According to Lévi- Strauss, “a real, absolute history
would be [...] confronted with chaos” (296). Collingwood said: “The
past is simply non-existent” (101), while Heidegger feared that “time
as history has vanished from the lives of all people” (1959, 202).
Derrida in Of Grammatology calls for the annihilation of history
itself: “reading should be free, at least in its axis, from the classical
categories of history — not only the categories of the history of ideas
and the history of literature but also, and probably above all, from the
categories of the history of philosophy” (xxxix). Foucault wrote his
Archaeology of Knowledge in a spirit of “post-” or “beyond-history”,
stressing not continuity and totality but discontinuity and difference
in history and claiming that his “archeology” establishes “that we are
difference, that our reason is the difference of discourses, our history,
the difference of times, our selves the difference of masks. That
difference [...] is the dispersion that we are and make” (131). With
the insistence on difference, struggle becomes the decisive category
of history, rather than the synthesizing concepts of theory; and
The Space-Time Continuum 285

consciousness and spirit (and language) are transferred into the


encompassing concept of power (which, of course, makes Habermas
Foucault’s “natural” opponent). In most influential contemporary
positions (even in Habermas), the possible gains ground over the
actual and the substantial/essential (as it does — in different ways —
in Nietzsche’s “perspectivism”, William James’ pragmatism, in
Wittgenstein’s “language games”, Einstein’s relativity theory,
Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle, or the postmodern theory of
“determinative chaos”). Foucault, in an interview statement, even
goes as far as to say: “I am well aware that I have never written
anything but fictions. I do not mean to say, however, that truth is
therefore absent. It seems to me that the possibility exists for fiction
to function in truth. [...] One ‘fictions’ history on the basis of a
political reality that makes it true, one ‘fictions’ a politics not yet in
existence on the basis of a historical truth” (1980, 193). This leads to
a position expressed in the English title of Adorno’s book Against
Epistemology. Adorno’s negative dialectics recognizes that
“unbroken”, non-ironic concepts of truth are even apt to turn into
tools of domination because “[e]very state of things is horizontally
and vertically tied to all others”. The very “category of the root, the
origin [and one might add, causality] is a category of domination”
(Adorno 1990, 267, 255).
This is of course the postmodern stance. Past experience
cannot be relived and concepts do not call forth the one and only
“truth” but are fictitious, and the synthesizing general idea of what
happened appears to be merely speculative and subject to
complementary views and change. With relation to history, Kohler in
Gass’s The Tunnel cries out: “What trivial nonsense truths are, how
false in fact their elevation. It’s a mere name, yes, a flattering
designation [...], it’s Descartes’ deceitful demon” (269). A character
in Pynchon’s novel Mason & Dixon refers to truth in history with the
disillusioned remark: “Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is
hir’d or coerc’d, only in Interests that must ever prove base” (350).
“Time is the Space that may not be seen” (326); history appears to be
“Calling into a Void” (179), “revealing nothing, as it absorbs
ev’rything” (179).
Postmodernism, in Jameson’s words, has “its peculiar way
with time”, which leads to “the disappearance of a sense of history”
(1983, 118, 125). Postmodernism shows, in Jameson’s words, “a
286 From Modernism to Postmodernism

consequent weakening of historicity, both in our relationship to


public History and in the new forms of our private temporality”, and
develops what he, following Lacan, calls a “schizophrenic structure”
(1992, 54). The loss of the sense of history has also something to do
with the opacity of language. If language is the medium that gives us
access to the world, to the “experience of temporality, human time,
past, present, memory, the persistence of personal identity” (119),
then the clichéness and disorder of language, and the inability of the
subject “to accede fully into the realm of speech and language” (118)
disrupt the order, the “good” continuity of time (119). The
protagonist in Gass’s The Tunnel notes that “the study of history is
the study of language in one form or another”, because via language
“we really fabricate our past” (271). Jorge Luis Borges begins an
essay with the statement: “Perhaps the history of the world is the
history of a few metaphors”, and he ends it with an even more radical
statement: “Perhaps the history of the world is the history of the
different intonations of a few metaphors”.80 Instead of metaphors,
Coover cloaks history in numbers, a procedure that again works with
constructionist signs. The protagonist in The Universal Baseball
Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. says to his friend Lou
Engels: “History. Amazing, how we love it. And did you ever stop to
think that without numbers or measurements, there probably
wouldn’t be any history?” (49)

6.2.2.1. History, Self, Society, and the Aesthetic Design: Gass,


Coover, Barth

Concepts of time are historical phenomena; they cater to “the


dream of all men: to re-create Time” (Gass, Tun 272). After the
weakening of religious dogmas and of the belief in a wise and
unchanging nature as a substitute for God, human society erected the
tribunal of history to pass judgments on good and evil and to create
meaning in terms of origin and goal. The relationship towards time
and history was defined by the new experience of the rapid change of
the social and personal conditions. Time was already an important
theme in the writings of the Renaissance, and the clock had by the
eighteenth century become so important that in Gulliver’s Travels the
Lilliputians surmise that Gulliver’s God is the clock, because he calls
it his “oracle, and said it pointed out the time for every action of his
The Space-Time Continuum 287

life” (32). An overpowering sense of the breathtaking acceleration of


change apparent in the progress of science and technology
distinguishes the sense of time in the nineteenth century. J.H.
Buckley notes that “as Carlyle suggested, nineteenth-century
absorption in time, in the troublous time-element, differed both in
kind and degree [from that of the eighteenth century]. The notion of
public time, or history, as the medium of organic growth and
fundamental change rather than simply additive succession, was
essentially new. Objects hitherto apparently stable had begun to lose
their old solidity” (Triumph 5). In the nineteenth century, however, at
least in the early parts of it, private time and collective “social” time
still appeared to be readily available and formed a friendly medium
in which all conflicts, inner and outer, personal and social, could be
alleviated and absorbed through a still unbroken belief in progress
and the future.81 The belief in a good continuation of time towards an
ever better economic and social future provided solace for the
transitoriness of individual life. Thus in fiction the future of the
individual often came to be represented — after the resolution of
conflicts — as something known, as a static condition, containing a
kind of human eternity in the happy end, often in a place of
everlasting contentment that fulfilled desire and absorbed and
transcended time (Scott, The Heart of Midlothian; Disraeli, Sybil;
Dickens, Bleak House; Hardy, The Return of the Native).
In modernism, as mentioned, the perspective on time does
not arise out of a dualistic, two-dimensional distinction between
mechanical and mental time. In modern texts history can be a
deadening weight for the self. In Joyce’s Ulysses the desolation and
bleakness of a merely mechanical course of historical time and the
oppression caused by a meaningless past are expressed in the words
of Stephen Dedalus: “Time surely would scatter all [...] — History is
a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” (42). To avoid the
dead weight of history, the one-dimensional logic of temporal
sequence and causality, is to be given up in favor of simultaneity of
epochs and the freedom of choosing and aestheticizing history for the
artistic purposes of art. The aesthetic reconnection of history and
meaning is often (as T.S. Eliot said of Joyce’s Ulysses) “simply a
way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance
to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is
contemporary history” (1923, 157). This is a fabrication of history
288 From Modernism to Postmodernism

that in Joyce’s case entails “manipulating a continuous parallel


between modernity and antiquity” (157); consciously omitted as
decadent are the late developments of Western civilization. This
selective method is ultimately based on the (aestheticizing) concept
that, in Ezra Pound’s radical phrase, “all ages are contemporaneous”,
and can be montaged at will. The reason for this simultaneity of
historical epochs in the human mind is that “we do NOT know the
past in chronological sequence but [...] by ripples and spirals eddying
out from us and from our own time” (1968, 60). This allows modern
literary texts to make a selection of history for an aesthetic design
that creates meaning through temporal contrast. The manipulation of
history for contrasting structural purposes marks a first stage in the
aestheticization of history; it serves to express the viewpoints, the
concerns, and interests of the present in dualistic aesthetic form by
either elevating or devaluating the past.
Postmodern fiction then radicalizes this aesthetization of
time, which is then liberated from the “usual” forms of sequentiality,
causality, and other meaning-giving schemas that restrict and
humanize the force of time; it develops new forms of time with the
non-organic and non-psychological strategies of fabrication, of
montage. In postmodern fiction the perspective on time and history is
not dualistic as in modern fiction but multi-perspectival, and includes
in true postmodern manner existential, epistemological, ontological,
as well as comical, parodic, self-ironizing viewpoints. One is aware
of the constructedness and the ambivalence of all time concepts.
Fiction can therefore construct the dimension of the past without
being obliged to live again through its ideas and values, its
deceptions and defeats. This does not exclude a reaction of concern
and vigilance in regard to (false) conceptualizations and
sentimentalizations of history. These constructions of history and
time orient themselves quite “naturally” towards the three crucial
aspects of human life, the self, society, and the universe. They can
be, and mostly are, of course, combined. (1) When the orientation is
towards the self, the perspective is quasi-existential — not existential
in the sense that a character is personally suffering under the weight
of the history of his or her own country and time and its traditional
schemes of order, as in the case of Stephen Dedalus (though the
universal aspect of history comes into play there, too) — but in the
sense that now, instead of, or in addition to, psychological concerns,
The Space-Time Continuum 289

epistemological and ontological uncertainties come to the fore and


affect the character’s self. Such is Kohler’s case in Gass’s The
Tunnel. (2) If the perspective is oriented towards society, the satirical
perspective takes note of the false simplifications of history, less
from an ethical than from an epistemological or ontological point of
view, and replaces them with more complex ones. This is the
scenario in Coover’s The Public Burning. (3) Finally, history as
time-structure is adapted to purely aesthetic aims, abstracted from
self and society, and, as a means of knowledge, turned against itself
by multiplying and reconstructing it. This is Barth’s strategy.82
In Gass’s novel The Tunnel, the existential, confessional, and
epistemological modes of looking at history combine with
relativizing, ironic perspectives. The American historian Kohler
attempts to write the “impossible introduction” (155) to his book
Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany, but fails in his endeavor to
compose a final summation: “Imagine: history not serious enough,
causality too comical, chronology insufficiently precise. That’s the
measure of my turn” (107). He comes to realize that “[w]e were
happy because we had no history. [...] Though I was writing what is
called history” (108). “History is the abyss of the doomed” (185). He
reflects: “there must be an underworld under this world, a
concealment of history beneath my exposition of it, a gesture which
will symbolize my desperation” (153). The existential gesture
expressing his desperation is his digging a tunnel through the earth
starting out from the cellar of his home: “My tunnel is my quarrel
with the earth. The quarrel is the play, but not the producer” (162).
Gass existentializes Kohler’s problem as that of his character by
dissociating himself from him: “This is Kohler’s problem, not mine.
[...] When Kohler says his subject is too serious for scholarship, etc.,
he means it is too personal, that the modes he mentions won’t satisfy
him. It reflects his mood”. (Bellamy 1974, 35.) Yet postmodern
fiction has its problems with this, his mood, with the confessional
mode, because the latter has a “realistic” note and is, as it were, one-
dimensional. Gass himself describes the problem: “It’s the true-
confession I suspect. The ME. I was THERE. And what was
THERE? ME! Wholly unprofessional. Totally inartistic. The socalled
confessional mode has an immediate rhetorical power [...] which is
fake, cheap. In these works the subject matter does your work for
you, but the aesthetic qualities are all left out. So the problem is to
290 From Modernism to Postmodernism

get in the confessional mode, take away the confessional power, and
reclaim that power in the language” (LeClair and McCaffery 165-
66).
Gass broadens the confessional mode also beyond the
problem of language, by making history an epistemological problem.
Kohler is incapable of isolating reasons for what happened under the
Nazis, to establish uni-logical chains of causality. He always has to
face the simultaneity of mutually exclusive determinants, and thus is
unable to confront meaningfully the crucial epistemological, ethical,
and ontological questions, including the question of the meaning of
history and the vicissitudes of “the world”. Gass “reclaims” the
“confessional power” for his book by distinguishing fiction’s
concern with particularity (the confessional mode) from history’s
task of analyzing the universal. This makes Kohler an artist adverse
to generalizations. In Gass’s words: “History, as I see it, can strive
for the universal. My objection to it is simply that it rarely,
reasonably, does. [...] For me fiction isn’t an alternative to anything
[...], and it doesn’t strive for universals. It merely makes particular
things out of universals” (Bellamy 1974, 35).
While Gass has a problem with the confessional mode, and
therefore “takes away” its power only to “reclaim” it after
broadening its scope, Coover has his difficulties with bringing to
history the social-critical mode and its value-consciousness. For one,
postmodern epistemological and ontological uncertainties, the
concomitant attitudes of contradiction and paradox, as well as the
narrative strategies of multiplicity and simultaneity do not allow a
linear and univalent understanding of history, which would be
necessary for satire. Furthermore, the blurring of borderlines between
reality and fiction makes all concepts and interpretations of history
fictitious, while satire relies on a “realistic” base for its critique. But
this is not all. The situation is rather complex. Though historical
explanations can be manipulated as part of power games and thus are
open to satire, society’s interpretative maneuvers in general in fact
aim also at a consoling framework of historical coherence and
continuity for everybody. Yet the attempt to give duration to ideas
and interpretations, independent of historical change, turns these
notions into clichés. The reintroduction of these clichés into the
actual world with which they clash transposes the stereotypes of
belief into acts of violence. The writer, facing history under ethical
The Space-Time Continuum 291

auspices, thus has a triple problem. The first problem is, to use
Gass’s terms, “to get in” the social-critical mode, in spite of all
complications and complexities. The second arises out of the
necessity of taking away the one-dimensional judgmental power of
social criticism, and of opening it to epistemological questions and
personal anxieties. Finally, the third problem lies in the difficulty
then to reclaim the critical power of satire. This layering of aspects is
obviously a very strenuous task. It can only be achieved by the
fantastication of the world, which takes the text out of the ruts of
one-dimensional realism and its mimetic goals. It further needs the
conceptualization of history as both cliché and myth, in order to be
able to perspectivize it in multiple terms, in the ironic, satiric, and
comic modes. It also requires the existential approach because
clichés and myths are expressions of the fear of people and
communities, the fear of emptiness, meaninglessness, and the void.
A sensitive character, who is right in the middle of the power
structure and has access to the data and is affected by the discrepancy
between clichéd belief and the factual social and political world,
could best both reflect and dramatize the complexity of the situation.
The historical dimension thus adds to ethical scruples epistemo-
logical doubt, or rather, strengthens the latter, whose concern with
“truth” makes satire (which requires a clear-cut value system) a very
complex affair.
These are the problems that Coover faces in The Public
Burning¸ a novel about the Rosenberg trial, the conviction of
husband and wife as Soviet spies and their execution in a
burlesque/fantastic scene on Times Square. Coover quite consciously
chooses a historical “boundary-situation” (Jasper) that can be
dramatized. For him “the execution of the Rosenbergs had been a
watershed event in American history which we had somehow
managed to forget or repress. [...] but it was important that we
remember it [...] or else it can happen again and again (LeClair and
McCaffery 77- 78). His attitude towards history cannot but be
ambivalent, in fact is double-poled: “it’s a kind of confrontation with
History, the liberal dogma of History, its sacrosanct nature borrowed
from the authority of the Bible, it’s also a kind of enhancement of it,
a celebration, a deep respect for the moment itself, which I’m trying
to make more vivid, more memorable — more ‘real,’ as it were”
(Ziegler and Bigsby 91). The result is that The Public Burning “was
292 From Modernism to Postmodernism

made up of thousands and thousands of tiny fragments that had to be


painstakingly stitched together. [...] It was like a gigantic impossible
puzzle” (LeClair and McCaffery 75). Since, in social terms, history is
one of “the constructs that bind a group together” (Gado 155),
Coover was “striving for a text that would seem to have been written
by the whole nation throughout its history, as though the sentences
had been forming themselves all this time, accumulated toward this
experience (LeClair and McCaffery 75-76).
The media, especially “Time Magazine”, “the National Poet
Laureate” (PB 6) of America, and The New York Times, expressing
the “Spirit of History”, Coover sees as writing, interpreting, and
falsifying history in order to simplify and manipulate complexity for
the people but also to write on against the “terrible flux”. The New
York Times and others reconstruct history “with words and
iconography each fleeting day in the hope of discovering some
pattern, some coherence, some meaningful dialogue with time”,
though “[t]here are sequences but no causes, contiguities but no
connections” (PB 191, 190). The need for patterns and myths as
organizational matrices is filled by dualities, the “Manichean
struggle” “between the sons of light and the sons of darkness” (150),
the mythic Uncle Sam, “maker and shaper of world history” (263),
and his mythic antagonist, the Phantom (from the world of
communism), who has prompted the Rosenbergs to their trespass,
allegedly has instigated a world-encompassing plot, and has “altered
the course of history to the disadvantage of our country!” (25) To
further complicate the perspectives, Coover then “wanted someone
who lived inside the mythology, accepting it, and close to the center,
yet not quite in the center, off to the edge a bit, an observer”, who
was “a self-conscious character” and who “has to analyze everything,
work out all the parameters [...], worries about things” with a
“somewhat suspicious view of the world”. Vice-president Nixon
“proved ideal” (LeClair and McCaffery 74-75). The fact that Nixon,
who is near the center of the power system and narrates half the
chapters, becomes increasingly aware of the complexities of history,
the falseness of ideologies, and the problematics of distinguishing
between right and wrong, adds a questioning and confessional note
and also a comical touch to the book.83
Another way to approach history in the postmodern novel is
to start not with ethical problems but with epistemological
The Space-Time Continuum 293

uncertainties. The multivalence and constructedness of history


liberates the imagination from the fixity of uni-logical truths and
gives occasion to play with possibilities of interpretation and
evaluation. This is what Barth does. In his own words, we can turn
“the adjective weight of accumulated history [...] against itself to
make something new and valid” (LF 106). He says that “the use of
historical or legendary material, especially in a farcical spirit, has a
number of technical virtues, among which are aesthetic distance and
counter-realism” (Bellamy 1974, 10). This distancing attitude entails
the refusal to accept historical facts as such and to believe in the
standard versions of history, which are complemented with, and
replaced by, other versions because they are every bit as true as those
in the history textbooks.84 Maintaining as frames of reference the
dialectics of cause and effect, good and evil, truth and falsity, time
and timelessness, Barth plays with them, as he does with the “facts”,
because “[t]he sum of history” is “no more than the stuff of
metaphors” (Bellamy 1974, 11, cf. Borges). Since “[f]act is fantasy;
the made-up story is a model of the world” (Ch 256), Barth invents
in The Sot-Weed Factor, in addition to Captain Smith’s official
narrative, the latter’s secret diary, The Secret Historie of the Voiage
Up the Bay of Chesapeake, which claims to relate the “true” events
of Smith’s encounters with the Indians and also the true facts of the
Pocahontas legend. In addition to this, he creates a diary of Smith’s
companion Burlingame, senior, The Privie Journall of Sir Henry
Burlingame, which again corrects Captain Smith’s versions. In The
Sot-Weed Factor, Giles Goat-Boy, and Chimera, time expands to
include linear and cyclical concepts of time, history and myth and the
concepts of myth, all of which are playfully unmasked as mere
(language) constructions and yet at the same time made use of for
aesthetic, operational purposes, so to speak “under erasure”
(Derrida), as matrices of the narrative, in fact as form, held in
unstable balance with the force of correction and superimposition.
And in the extensive network of relations, mythic and historical,
cyclical and linear models of time are re-connected to personal time.
The gain is a dramatic perspective evolving from the personal
struggle of the protagonists with the past or with pastness, and from
the necessity to overcome it. The operational pattern is repetition, or
rather, re-enactment of the past:
294 From Modernism to Postmodernism

any historical or mythic past that haunts, craps up, fertilizes the present is
an emblem of our personal past. The theme, certainly of the Perseus story,
certainly of the Bellerophon story, and most certainly of the work in
progress [LETTERS], is the comic, tragic, or paradoxical re-enactment of
the past in the present. Perseus, for example, in the Chimera, attempts
systematically to re-enact a past which, at the time, was unselfconscious
and heroic. At the midpoint of his life, after he has accomplished the
heroic paradigm, Perseus recognizes that he has in fact fulfilled the
prerequisites of mythic heroism. And then, at a point where he feels
himself stagnating, he attempts a program of rejuvenation by re-enacting
his heroic past. Of course, one can’t do that: he comes a cropper and
finally has to arrive at his new equilibrium or transcension by a different
route from the one that made him a mythic hero in the first place.
Bellerophon attempts to become a mythic hero by perfectly imitating the
actuarial program for mythic heroes. Of course, that doesn’t work, and he
finds that by perfectly imitating the model of mythic heroism, what he
becomes is a perfect imitation of a mythic hero — which is not the same
thing as a mythic hero. My characters in the new novel will act out,
whether they know it or not, Marx’s notion that historical events and
personages recur, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce.
This is also what happens to Perseus in Chimera: his attempts to re-enact
his heroic past becomes farcical, a fiasco. It is only when he reassesses the
situation (with the help of Calyxa and eventually with Medusa) that he is
able to elevate his re-enactment into something greater: which, if not
heroic, is at least more personally successful (Ziegler and Bigsby 25).

Barth aims at the “coincidentia oppositorum” (LeClair and


McCaffery 28); but the protagonists fail at the endeavor to attain
synthesis. This failure, however, opens space for (self)irony and the
comic and parodic perspectives. No real and lasting synthesis is
possible because there is always “a qualification of attitudes so that
attitudes have their counterattitudes” (LeClair and McCaffery 17).
This gives occasion both for dramatization and ironization. Attitudes
of the tragic and the comic or the farcical are set against one another,
as are the two models of the past, the linear and the historical, the
cyclical and the mythic. “[T]he vicissitudes of a wandering hero”
(Ziegler and Bigsby 28) offer the author the opportunity to qualify
attitudes with counterattitudes. The wandering hero balances his life
between pattern (past) and individuality (present), which makes for
further tension. Barth extends the notion of re-enactment of the past
to the re-use of characters from previous novels, for instance, in
LETTERS. This model of re-enactment also includes the literary
sensibilities and strategies of the past. Barth says that “The Sot-Weed
Factor was composed, along with all the other reasons, with certain
The Space-Time Continuum 295

things in mind about the history of the novel, including the history of
my own novels”. He felt his hands “tied by the history of the genre”
so that “you would almost have to be parodying the genre in some
respect to bring it off” (Bellamy 1974, 6-7).

6.2.2.2. Presentism and Nomadism

The opacity of the past and the inability of the self to make it
meaningful can lead to the loss of personal and collective history; the
flow of time is reduced to the present. History then is seen to consist
in “the fragmentation of time into a series of perpetual presents”
(Jameson 1983, 125). Considered from a transhuman perspective,
this is a liberation of the force of time from the human schemes of
order. From a human standpoint it is both a threat to human control
and a challenge to the imagination to enlarge its scope. In negative
terms, the denial of temporal order impairs the sequential narrative
structure and de-individualizes the fictional character by the
deprivation of continuity, which leaves a vacuum. Under the
condition of presentism, the writer and the character either face the
loss of the past without emotion, or they deplore the loss as an
amputation of the narrative and the self. Beckett’s The Unnamable
has no definable plot, no namable character, no describable setting
and no chronological time flow. In the performance of a continuous
present tense, not bound by the past, by memory, or by “facts”, the
“I, [...] of whom I know nothing” (304) pushes on to ever-new limits
of apprehension. For Borges, “the present is indefinite [...] the future
has no reality other than as a present hope [...] the past has no reality
other than as a present memory” (Lab 10). Federman writes in
Surfiction: “In the fiction of the future, all distinctions [...] between
the past and the present [...] will be abolished. All forms of duplicity
will disappear” (8). Robbe-Grillet says that time in his texts “seems
to be cut off from its temporality. It no longer passes. It no longer
completes anything” (1966, 155, 122). Sukenick notes: “[r]eality
doesn’t exist, time doesn’t exist, personality doesn’t exist”.
Burroughs remarks that “[t]here is only one thing a writer can write
about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing ... I am
a recording instrument. ... I do not presume to impose ‘story’ ‘plot’
‘continuity’ (NL 221). The ideal authors for such novels of
presentism would be the extra-terrestrial Tralfamadorians in
296 From Modernism to Postmodernism

Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five who live in a state of affirmation


without question. For them time “does not change. It does not lend
itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by
moment” (86), the reason being that “in fact this moment simply is
[... .] There is no why” (66).
By living in a fragmented time, a “series of perpetual
presents”, the fictional character loses the sense of a coherent self.
Already Camus’s absurd man does not permit himself belief “in the
profound meaning of things”, but rather lives during his “day-to-day
revolt” solely in the “succession of presents” (54, 41, 47). One of
Borges’ characters questions the state of the self in terms of time and
memory: “Who was I? Today’s self, bewildered, yesterday’s,
forgotten; tomorrow’s, unpredictable?” (qtd. in D. Harvey 41) This is
what Barthelme calls the advent of “pastless, futureless man” (41). In
Snow White, it is said: “[o]ur becoming is done. We are what we are.
Now it is just a question of rocking along with things as they are
until we are dead”. (128). The Reverend Furber in Gass’s
Omensetter’s Luck notes: “So it is with us. So it is with me. [...]
Buried in this air, I rot. Moment by moment, I am not the same”
(201). The narrator of Gass’s Mrs. Mean says: “I am no image, on
my porch — no symbol. I don’t exist” (113). In Renata Adler’s
Speedboat, Jan Fain, who is an alienated observer of the fragmented
world and the fragmented self says: “I have lost my sense of the
whole. I wait for events to take a form” (148). The Genie in Barth’s
“Dunyazadiad” remarks: “I lost track of who I am” (Ch 18). Failing
to make sense of history, Kohler in Gass’s The Tunnel, notes: “I
always am, and never was” (109). Burlingame in Barth’s The Sot-
Weed Factor speaks of personality as a “Heraclithean flux” (204);
and in Gaddis’s The Recognitions, the narrator says “that
consciousness [...] was a [mere] succession of separate particles
being carried along on the surface of the deep and steady
unconscious flow of life, of time itself [...]” (58), the flow of life and
time being beyond grasp or articulation. In Elkin’s The Dick Gibson
Show, Dick, in the author’s own words, is a “bodiless being”
(LeClair and McCaffery 121). Dick claims that “the voice is the
sound of the soul”, but his soul is as much a void as the air, into
which an imagined community of listeners wail and scream their
compulsive confessions, private fears and self-obsessed questions.
Ben Flesh in Elkin’s The Franchiser “is deprived of all warrants of
The Space-Time Continuum 297

personality”, “has in lieu of a life” (282) a function as the connector


of all the knots on the map that mark his franchises. In Gravity’s
Rainbow, Slothrop suffers a complete loss of time and identity and
simply disappears from the text.
The exclusion of past and history as structuring features of
time entails a loss of breadth and depth not only in character, but also
in plot and narrative structure, making time infinite, without
beginning and end. In Italo Calvino’s Winter’s Night, “the dimension
of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in
fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and
immediately disappears” (WNT 13). Brautigan’s In Watermelon
Sugar makes time appear to stand still in a state of complete de-
vitalization. The loss of the “dream of all men: to re-create Time”
(Tun 272) means also the loss of the bond between the present and
the future. The impossibility of “fabricat[ing] our past” (Tun 271)
includes the impossibility of fabricating our future. The anticipation
of the future (sometimes in the guise of reconstructing the myths of
the past), is curtailed either to preconceptions of catastrophe, i.e.,
apocalypse (Pynchon, Gravity´s Rainbow, Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle),
or the expectation of inertia, a state of spent energy, of entropy
(Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity´s Rainbow, Gaddis, JR), or
the anticipation of emptiness, for, in Gass’s phrase, “[o]n the other
side of a novel lies the void” (OL 49). Since cutting off a meaningful
past and a future that gives hope leaves only the present open, the
present has to bear all the weight of making sense and must not end.
Completion means finality and death. The text, by abandoning the
unilinear logic of causality and finality and by replacing them with
multiplicity, indeterminacy and immanence, aims at incompletion
and limitlessness, at the imaginary, continuous movement, the flow
of time, the creation of an infinite variety of possible worlds — in
short, the filling of the threatening vacuum.
Nevertheless, what Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault perceive
in presentism is not merely a loss of form but also a gain of force. In
Deleuze’s terms, the heterogeneous lines of force create continuous
change and transcend the stasis of segmentarity by a new
“nomadism”, which is a new mobility, a new presentism. The
imagination works along these heterogeneous lines of force and
transfers nomadism into the text. Though it is said in Barth’s “Echo”,
that “[o]vermuch presence appears to be the story-teller’s problem”
298 From Modernism to Postmodernism

(LF 98) — namely the problem of repetition and filling the blanks —
the presentness of time offers a great chance to affirm the force of
openness. This presupposes two things, the realization and accep-
tance of the two aspects of time: its fundamental openness and its
constructedness by human perspectives. Inspiration does not come
from the humanizing structures of time but from Deleuze’s second
form of time, aion, pre-individual and impersonal time, the temporal
vacancy out of which everything that exists takes its origin. This is
the time of freedom, force, and the imagination and of art’s
singularity, and it rejects the first form of time, chronos,
chronological time, and its traditional concepts and categorizations
that produce closure. Form is not derived from these preconceived
fixed patterns of time that deny the fundamental openness of time,
but from imaginative constructions that are variable, fluid, re-
placeable, can be perspectivized and are the equivalent to the
“nomadic” existence of the character in a realm of possibilities. This
opens the text to a wide variety of aestheticizations of time, which
are double-coded in the sense that they represent the openness, i.e.,
the force of time, in their own energetic transformations, and at the
same time give this force form by opening succession to simul-
taneity, by applying (multiple) perspectives of evaluation to time,
and by playing with gaps and blanks, thus creating incongruities,
which in the controlling form paradoxically, however, again
represent the uncontrollable force of time. In its deconstructive and
reconstructive activities, this creative process is ultimately not a
negation but an affirmation of the force of time, affirmation in the
sense of what Derrida calls a “Nietzschean affirmation, that is the
joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of
becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without
truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation”
(1978, 292).
In postmodern fiction, the aestheticization of time can no
longer rely, as modernism does, on the contrast between past and
present or on their meaningful mental fusion. History is neither
simply a weight on nor an enrichment of the present and its potential
of meaning. It is neutral and perspectival. By replacing “strong”
meta-concepts of imposed order like origin, continuity, causality, and
teleology with more “tolerant” and “weaker” ones like simultaneity,
discontinuity, complementarity, complexity, and possibility, the
The Space-Time Continuum 299

ground is laid for reconstructions of history, as demanded by


Nietzsche and Heidegger and then, among others, Foucault, Derrida
and Lyotard (see also Carroll 1987). Guided by the “weaker” notions
of time, which deconstruct the “strong” dualities that dominate
traditional and modern thought, the imagination gains a new positive
angle on time, on its liberating possibilities in terms of non-
generalized and non-generalizable difference. Difference is closely
related to simultaneity; it in fact both creates the simultaneity of
possibilities and makes room for the force of time in the singularity
of energetic things that elude and exclude the form-giving
generalizations of time. Difference is here not only a language
phenomenon in terms of Saussure and Derrida (the signifier’s only
gaining significance by its difference from other signifiers), but
rather the rescue of the particular and its source of energy from the
general by putting the singular and distinct outside the chain of linear
time, history, and causality, and the other rational categorizations.
Foucault writes his Archaeology of Knowledge in a spirit of “post-”
or “beyond-history”, stressing not continuity and totality but
discontinuity and difference in history and claiming that his
“archeology” establishes “that we are difference, that our reason is
the difference of discourses, our history the difference of times, our
selves the difference of masks. That difference [...] is the dispersion
that we are and make” (131).
Difference as strategy of decenterment and de-generalization
makes history and character manipulable and subjectable to a variety
of deconstructive and non-generalizing reconstructive perspectives.
Since the paradigms of thought create systems of differentiation,
difference calls up its opposite, sameness, almost automatically. But
sameness again calls up difference. In addition to what sameness
means as that which is alike, it, at least implicitly, designates a lack
of energy, a reification of time, a veritable standstill and loss of
vitality, so that the fiction can play with both difference and
sameness, and make both express force against form. Difference
affirms force; sameness affirms force ex negativo, by calling up the
“other”, in spite of its “minus function”. Time is reified in Robbe-
Grillet’s Jealousy by its actualizing only the visual surface of things,
but the rigid, opaque surface suggests ex negativo difference,
passion, jealousy. Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar devitalizes time
by having sameness reign, the sameness of harmony without
300 From Modernism to Postmodernism

difference and passion, but difference and love stir under the surface,
and violence appears directly when a group of people kill themselves
publicly in protest against paralyzing sameness. And in Barthelme’s
Snow White, the stifling sameness and boredom of the ordinary
necessarily call up the vision of, and the wish for, the excitement of
the extraordinary. The result in all three cases is a pattern of presence
and absence, in which the missing dimension of time and life (past,
present, future; vitality and energetics) and the absent pole of the
paradigm difference vs. sameness either appear “under erasure” or
articulate themselves as desire for the other.

6.2.2.3 Multiplications of Times: Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

In the representation of temporality, difference is the


difference of discourses of time, of the discourses of past, present,
and future, of empty time and chronological time, of linear and
cyclical time, of “mechanical” and mental time, all of which are, of
course, constructions, masks of time; they draw for their
compositions on a “pool” of human discourses of time. The complex
postmodern texts of, say, Barth, Coover, Pynchon, attain their form
from a grid of such discourses of time, which lead to an
unprecedented manifoldness and complication of temporality, and, as
a result of this complexity of time versions, establish what is called
“spatial form”, the simultaneity of (mutually exclusive) rivaling
historical, mythical and existential notions of time which create a
pattern of incongruity, of contradiction, of paradox. The latter is the
imaginary form of the always-masked force of time. Pynchon’s
Gravity’s Rainbow is a model case.85 Joining modern and postmodern
traits, the text combines public and personal history, interrelated in
such a way that the resources of multiplicity and simultaneity are
endlessly extended. History is on the one hand “sterile history — a
known past, a projectable future” (126); then this “history [is] at best
a conspiracy, not always among gentlemen, to defraud”. What is
taught in school is, “[h]istory as sequences of violence, battle after
battle”; hidden is the fact that “the real business of the War is buying
and selling [... ;] The true war is a celebration of markets” (105). But
then a serial notion of history intervenes. Rather early in the book the
question is asked: “Will Postwar be nothing but ‘events,’ newly
created one moment to the next? No links? Is it the end of history?”
The Space-Time Continuum 301

(56) This entropic, beyond-history view of time, a destructive mode


of presentism, is spatially presented in the description of the
Midworks in the concentration camp Dora where the V2 was
produced, and where “All the objects have grown still, drowned,
enfeebled with evening, terminal evening. [...] when there is no more
History”. Though time is destructive, time and history provide
“personal density” (509) for Slothrop, the protagonist. The loss of
past and future, of personal density, then “scatters” him, makes him
disappear from the novel.86
Linearity of time and history is complemented with
cyclicality of time and myth. A mythical center is what the Herero
Enzian, one of the central characters of the book “wants to create”; it
“will have no history. It will never need a design change. Time, as
time is known to the other nations, will wither away inside this new
one” (318-19). But this new time as duration and center is set inside
the dark mythical stages of history that the Hereros and their legends
represent; it is already ironized and devaluated by the language used
(“Erdschweinhöhle”), and by the fact that the mythical place of the
past is substituted for present time and used to deactivate and thus
reify time, a fact that appears to be a regression: “The
Erdschweinhöhle will not be bound, like the Rocket, to time. The
people will find the Center again, the Center without time, the
journey without hysteresis, where every departure is a return to the
same place, the only place” (319). Yet then a further complication
occurs. The timeless mythical notion of the Hereros circles back to
time-filled history and establishes a parallel to the Rocket whose
relation to the Hereros is manifold.
On the one hand, the rocket is first made to parallel Herero
history, which is a history without logic and reason (without reason
for their almost-extermination by von Trotha’s punitive expedition).
On the other hand, a direct (and ironic) parallel between the mythic
quality of the “Erdschweinhöhle” and the Rocket is established. This
is possible because the rocket is a kind of myth too, a modern myth
meant to overcome time in space: “To integrate here is to operate on
a rate of change so that time falls away: change is stilled” (301). In
fact, the half-circular trajectory of the rocket’s flight connects it with
the cosmic serpent. It is subject to gravity, but is “not, as we might
imagine, bounded below by the line of the Earth it ‘rises from’ land
the Earth it ‘strikes’ [...] It Begins Infinitely Below The Earth And
302 From Modernism to Postmodernism

Goes On Infinitely Back Into The Earth it’s only the peak that we are
allowed to see” (726). Lyle Bland, a character in the text, notes the
mythical component that adheres to gravity, namely “that Gravity,
taken so for granted, is really something eerie, Messianic,
extrasensory in Earth’s mindbody” (590). The Rocket and the con-
cept of gravity come to signify the uncontrollable, indefinable;
gravity is the symbol of Earth’s power and the process of life, of
nature’s anti-mechanistic stance, and beneficial influence, the
cyclicality of nature’s organic process. Gravity appears to the
“System’s” adherents as something demonic, the medium of
resistance against “Their” rationalistic linearity of thought and
action, because it comes “out of the other silent world”, symbolizing
aion, the pool of time, and the natural power of cyclical renewal.
Time in Gravity’s Rainbow remains ultimately non-
patternable, i.e., non-humanizable. Simultaneity and plurality,
incongruity and gaps establish a form of time’s force that counters
old forms, sequentiality, succession, and rational logic, and denies
“an ordered sense of history and time prevailing against chaos”
(216). The novel is in fact a sum-total of what time can be in
postmodern fiction. This includes the potential human reaction to
time’s masks. The characters come to see that Life is the ultimate
frame of reference (in contrast to society and history), that “life’s
single lesson” is that “there is more accident to it than a man can ever
admit to in a lifetime and stay sane” (300). Anti- or posthumanistic
thought tends to allot to men and women at most a place as equals
among other equals in the universe. The force of time, unchecked by
restraints, is received by humans as openness, which, however, is not
bearable for long, though it opens chances for renewal; it is perceived
as contingency, invalidating the ordering categories of the mind; and
it appears as cyclicality of time, overruling individual existence and
against which both human history and the individual human being
have to assert themselves as form if they want to constitute order in
time and the core of the self. The imposition of form on openness,
contingency and cyclicality, however, leads to rationalization and
categorization of time, of life and of society by the system. This also
causes the de-individualization of the self, in this case not by chaos
but by social schemes, rational structure and clichéd beliefs.
The problem is that there is not only a conflict between form
and force of time, between closure and openness, but that different
The Space-Time Continuum 303

kinds or dimensions of time-force both connect and clash, in terms of


movement and simultaneity, cyclicality and contingency. The human
being is subject to all their influences, but as an individual has to
make sense of them by coping primarily with the irreversible and
end-directed force of movement of time to which he or she is
irrevocably subjected. This is the source of drama, of desire, of
feeling and thought — less of action, since action needs the freedom
of the will, which is not given. There is no way to avoid tension; in
Barth’s words, “take linear plot, take resolution of conflict, take third
direct object, all that business, they may very well be obsolete
notions, [...] but in fact we still lead our lives by clock and calendar,
for example, and though the seasons recur our mortal human time
does not; we grow old and tired, we think of how things used to be or
might have been and how they are now, and in fact, and in fact we
get exasperated and desperate and out of expedients and out of
words” (LF 109). The existential task for both character and narrator
is the balancing of the flow of time by forms that make sense,
without abolishing the heterogeneity of time and life. The
protagonists of the novel accept the task, only then to fail in it, since
the dominance of form entails the suppression of force, and the
dominance of force means chaos, and both lead to entropy, which
leaves the human being stranded between the force and form of time.
Many of the struggles of ideas in postmodern fiction, especially in
Pynchon, concern the relationship between the ideas of force and
those of form, the notions of the random and the structured, the open
and the closed, life’s circularity or repetition and the human effort to
make the linearity of life meaningful. Interestingly enough, it is the
anti-formalist Sukenick who sketches the problem and gives reasons
for the need of form. By comparing improvisation, old-fashioned
form, and new formalism, he sketches a general development in
postmodern fiction:

Improvisation releases you from old forms, stale thoughts [...] It prevents
you from writing clichéd formulas. It’s a release, finally, a release of the
imagination. Today, however, I think, that the idea of improvisation itself
has become a formula and it has gotten very slack as a result. The novel
got tired of improvisation in the beginning of the ’70s. At least it did for
me. Presently I seem to be moving in the direction of formalism — the
kind of formalism that I think Coover and Abish are using. Another
example is the sort of thing Federman used in The Voice in the Closet, in
304 From Modernism to Postmodernism

which you simply impose a form on your materials, it not really mattering
how this form was generated (LeClair and McCaffery 291).

The most important narrative strategy in the struggle between force


and form has always been plot. In postmodern fiction it is reinstated,
i.e., imposed on the material or elicited from it, which in Pynchon is
the same thing, since the result is in both cases arbitrary. Or, plot is
reduced to mere succession.

6.2.3. The Linear Sequence of Plot, Succession As The


Simultaneity of Possibilities

6.2.3.1. Versions of Plot

Succession forms itself as plot, and plot degenerates into


succession. Simultaneity is a narrative technique that strives for
pluri-signification and the dominance of possibility over actuality.
The dominance of simultaneity is attained by expanding time into
infinity or opening the single situation to a multiplicity of per-
spectives, by interrelating situations, positions, values, or by fusing
situations, characters, positions in a manner that overlays them or
blends them into one. Within fiction’s labyrinth (a metaphor that
Borges, Barth and Pynchon make the signum of their narratives)
simultaneity and succession form the structure of winding or
bifurcating paths (Borges). These paths suggest succession of steps
forward or backward and offer at the same time a simultaneity of
choices, contrastive and endless possibilities of turning, branching
out, following up, seeking for a goal; they are labyrinthine, lead into
ever new repetitions and variations, reversals and exhaustions
without end. The salient feature of postmodern fiction is that all
three, (structured) plot, mere succession, and simultaneity, combine,
rival with, and relativize one another in what has been called “spatial
form”. This is partly true already of modern texts. Gass says about
Joyce: “He wants an experience that can happen only when the
reader moves constantly about the book. The notion of the space in
which this kind of book is constructed is quite different from the
notion of the time through which the Fielding work moves” (LeClair
and McCaffery 26).
Plot in narrative is a construct of order; its form is directed
by theme. Its function is to structure narrative. This role has been
The Space-Time Continuum 305

questioned since modernism. Gertrude Stein and Sherwood


Anderson, for instance, turn against plot as a well-regulated,
meaningful system of social and narrative order and try to destabilize
and decompose it so that it does not gain dominance over character,
but rather, if necessary or pertinent, grows out of the quest for
identity and truth. Postmodern writers (e.g., Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute)
have been skeptical of traditional plot, arguing against it along
“metaphysical”, aesthetic, or social lines. Plot, character, and
omniscient narrator are “obsolete notions based on metaphysical
assumptions that are no longer applicable” (Bellamy 1974, 14). As
Hawkes notes in an often-quoted statement: “I began to write fiction
on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot,
character, setting and theme” (Dembo and Pondrom 11). Sukenick,
writing about the “new tradition” in fiction, states somewhat
provocatively, though nonetheless in all seriousness: “Needless to
say the Bossa Nova has no plot, no story, no character, no chrono-
logical sequence” (1975b, 43). For Federman, “[t]he plot having
disappeared, it is no longer necessary to have the events of fiction
follow a logical sequential pattern (in time and space)” (1975, 10).
As mentioned, Burroughs sees himself as “a recording instrument ...
do[es] not presume to impose ‘story’ ‘plot’ ‘continuity’” (NL 221).
Kosinski asks “Is there a plot?” and answers, “[a] plot, a sense of
destiny, is provided for us by family tradition, by society, by a
political party or by our own indoctrinated imagination. The plot is
given by outsiders”, while in fact “our lives are not based on a single
plot; nor, for that matter, is our fiction” (Bellamy 1974, 160, 163).
For his part, Elkin is a bit more ambivalent: “I admire [...] a writer
like Iris Murdoch, whose novels are superbly plotted. I admire a
writer like William Trevor, whose novels are masterpieces of plot.
An attention to writing ought not to exclude an attention to plot. In
my case it does” (Sanders 143).
Plot has been interpreted in a variety of ways. Critics have
sought its frame of reference outside or inside the text. Jameson
locates its basis outside the text, in the social world. The fiction of
realist and even modernist writers “persuades us in concrete fashion
that human action, human life, is somehow a complete, interlocking
whole, a single, formed, meaningful substance [...] Our satisfaction
with the completeness of plot is therefore a kind of satisfaction with
society as well” (Jameson 1971, 12). Peter Brooks argues on a
306 From Modernism to Postmodernism

psychological level and finds the framework for plot again outside
narrative, in Freud’s concept of the unconscious; its “investments,
movements, and discharges of energies [... are] the place of drives or
instincts in conflict, a basic dualism whence comes its permanent
driving force”; “desire”, is the “motor of narrative”. Plot being the
“dynamic shaping force of the narrative discourse”, it is therefore
“the play of desire in time” (42, 52, 13, xiii). Structural narratologists
(e.g., Breton, Greimas), on the other hand, have argued from the
inside of narrative, considering plot the controlling structure of
narrative, its regulating and rationalizing power. The discussion has
remained controversial. While, as we will see, postmodern writers
either negate the rationalizing power of plot or re-interpret it with
regard to the new, deconstructive tendencies in fiction, M.-L. Ryan in
1991 re-makes plot into the most general feature of narrative,
emphasizing the rational and intelligible, unifying and uniform
aspects of narrative rather than its hybridity and impurity, dis-
continuity and multiplicity — traits, which are specifically important
for the postmodern writer.
The focus has definitely shifted in postmodern fiction
towards non-plot. Nevertheless, though it is true that, in Barth’s
words, not “everything works out and resolves itself in the end”
(Bellamy 1974, 14), plot still has its function. There are two
arguments to bring it back in. Both are aesthetic reasonings. Barth
maintains that “if you reject these devices on those grounds” —
namely that “the age of the plotted novel belongs to the age” when
“the writer’s audience believed in some kind of destiny or fate that
saw that things worked out” — then

you’re operating from an absolutely realist argument. It would be the


premises of realism, in other words, that would object to a literary
convention for those reasons [...] But another way to address that state of
affairs is to regard fiction as artifice in the first place. And if you
acknowledge and embrace the artificial aspect of art, which you can’t get
rid of anyway, then it doesn’t necessarily follow, for example, that you
have to abandon certain kinds of literary devices simply because they’re
metaphors for notions that are no longer viable. If you are working in the
comic mode, you may be free ipso facto to make use of all sorts of
conventions [also the character] because you’re parodying them [...] you
can exploit the outmoded conventions for all they’re worth to get certain
things done that you just can’t get done in any other way (Bellamy 1974,
14-15).
The Space-Time Continuum 307

The other argument starts out from a textual point of view, from the
linearity of the text. It opposes the identification of plot and rational
order and sees plot as growing out of the temporal process of
narrative, its succession and fluctuating organization, the endless
production of difference, the multiple proliferation and scattering of
structures, the pluralizing of all forms. Plot is then not so much a
means of imposing order on that which has none, a narrative form,
but a primal narrative force, resulting from the (undisciplined)
continuity (not the logical/causal regulation) of situations. It is form
invaded by force or force producing form. Its being form and force
makes the term itself ambivalent. This doubleness shows in the
writers’ utterances. Sukenick, for example, says in an interview, “I
don’t see my life in terms of sequential events, in terms of progress.
So I don’t see my life in terms of plot, or of an advance” (58); and he
notes with regard to fiction that “[t]hings don’t appear to happen
according to Aristotle any more” (1985, 139), obviously because the
traditional plot-paradigms seem to be exhausted; yet he also writes
that every detail in the text still shows “how events conspire. It
indicates a plot. The job of intelligence is to uncover [not impose]
this plot. [...] As you can see everything falls into place” (Sukenick,
Out 124-25). Though Frank Kermode states that “all [...] plotting
presupposes and requires that an end will bestow upon the whole
duration and meaning” (46), plot in postmodern fiction almost
always plays back and forth between form and force, order and
disorder, loosening the boundary lines and mostly refusing to come
to an end that bestows “upon the whole duration and meaning”.
Being double-poled as force and form, plot can be
interpreted in the one or the other direction. But as Sukenick’s
remark indicates, it can no more disappear from narrative than can
the elements of the situation, space, time, character, action/event,
which continue through the narrative without break-off and from
which plot originates as an uneven configuration in flux. In Barth’s
words: “Plot and theme: notions vitiated by this hour of the world but
as yet not successfully succeeded” (“Title”, LF 102). Plot is not
abolishable, not because the writer has to impose it on the narrative
as a clarifying diagram, but because the plot constitutes itself out of
the consecutiveness of situations which narrative inevitably builds.87
Plot in postmodern fiction is obviously determined by the fact that
narrative leans towards the force pole, empowered by desire and
308 From Modernism to Postmodernism

narrative energy that create difference rather than logical coherence,


difference also as simultaneity of the different, as the combination of
temporal and “spatial” form. In fact, the greatest postmodern novels
— like Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow — attain their vitality from
their experimenting with the interaction of time-following and time-
breaking strategies. Barth himself would like “to have it both ways”,
“to find a way to assimilate what’s gone before us in the twentieth
century — Joyce, Beckett, Borges, and the rest — and yet tell stories,
which is an agreeable thing to do” (Bellamy 1974, 5). The question
of course is how to do it, how to come up with an organized linearity
of narrative without getting into the rationality of plot in the
traditional sense. Barth’s answer, which would be shared by most of
his colleagues, does not help much, though it points in the most
acceptable direction, that of narrative movement: “The process is the
content, more or less” (10); the “more or less” would have to be
stressed. Gass would not be happy with such a view, because he is
“interested in the finished product. [...] But there are lots of writers,
many of whom I admire, who regard the finished work as simply a
byproduct of the activity of composition. [...] The danger is that, by
emphasizing process over product, you escape judgment” (LeClair
and McCaffery 31). Plot is placed between process and product,
uncertainty and judgment. The different ways plot appears and
disappears in postmodern fiction are summed up in the following
rough overview. It will also provide a clearer view of the role of
succession and simultaneity with which we will deal separately at the
end of this chapter.
(1) In a story/essay called “Plot”, Elkin interconnects plot
and character. Plot in fact grows out of desire and the resistance to
desire:

[P]lot, after all, is everywhere. A condition almost of grammar itself, it


comes, as it were, with the territory of personality, pronouns and proper
names. [...] Plot is simply the unity between what character desires and
how it seeks to satisfy those desires. It is a closed community of intention
that can be dissolved only by success or resignation. [...] Say plot is a
merging of two positions: What I want and what wants me. Obsession on
the one hand, resistance on the other [...] Plot’s soul is double then. What
the character wants to happen and what he does not want to happen. Order
and process arise from the first principle, and plot’s good fun, its suspense
and excitement and surprise from the second, each hand striving to be
uppermost. I don’t just mean conflict though, I mean fleshed conflict. Plot
The Space-Time Continuum 309

must have its reasons. Indeed, it is its reasons. What Aristotle calls ‘soul,’ I
would call bi-partisan soul, split theme. Motive must exist on both sides,
the character’s and the world’s. Plot would be the sum of these disparate
motives (73-74).

This play between the force of desire and the force of resistance is
the theme of books like The Dick Gibson Show, The Franchiser, and
The Living End.
(2) Plot can also be abstracted from character and mark an
ontological position. Plot construction then offers endless
possibilities of branching out, turning, reversing the direction, and
combining freedom, necessity, and chance — a dissolution of the
dualities that used to provide order. Borges (like other postmodern
fictionists) was fascinated with such plots. In his stories, spatial
simultaneity and temporal regressus ad infinitum both contrast and
connect in the concept of Chinese boxes: in every box there is
another box there is another box, etc.; or, in each labyrinth there is
another labyrinth there is another labyrinth, and so on. The linearity
and end-directedness of Borges’s labyrinthine plots, for instance the
quest, is always translated into open-endedness by means of
multiplying and superimposing motives, clues, and directions in such
a way that they become contradictory, diffused, ultimately
unrecognizable, or at least attain an equal status of (non)probability
for the reader, who finally finds him or herself in a decentered maze
without end. Consolation, however, always lies in the infinity of
possibilities on the way; actually the way is the end. In Barth’s
words, Borges “need not rehearse its [the labyrinth’s] possibilities to
exhaustion”; what he needs is the awareness of the infiniteness of its
possibilities to succeed in his “heroic enterprise, with salvation as its
object” (1984, 75). That is also what Barth says of himself when he
notes that “the process is the content” (Bellamy 1974, 10), and many
postmodern authors would join him. Plot is here practically deprived
of beginning and end, or at least of the end; it is the middle that
counts.
(3) Barth takes up Borges’s method of multiplying plot but
gives it a new accent by parodying plot patterns and their rationality,
a strategy that leads to a surplus of plot, thereby further loosening the
pattern of cause and effect. By using patterns the individual situation
is foregrounded. Barth writes: “But the possibility of constructing a
fantastically baroque plot appealed to me most, the idea of turning
310 From Modernism to Postmodernism

vigorously against the modernist notion that plot is an anachronistic


element in contemporary fiction” (Bellamy 1974, 11). In his Sot-
Weed Factor “the fantastically baroque plot” serves the principle of
circumstantial, seemingly arbitrary patterning. In the title story of
Lost in the Funhouse, the narrator explains: “the plot doesn’t rise by
meaningful steps but winds upon itself, digresses, retreats, hesitates,
sighs, collapses, expires” (92). It is fantasized in order to keep, in
Roland Barthes’s words, “the plural of a text” intact: “everything
signifies ceaselessly and several times, but without being delegated
to a great final ensemble, an ultimate structure” (1974, 11-12).
(4) In his search for viable stories and patterns, a writer like
Barth liberates possibilities that lie buried in the plotted stories of
other authors, especially in The Tales of One Thousand and One
Nights. In “Dunyazadiad”, one of the three stories in Barth’s
Chimera, Dunyazade, the sister of Scheherazade from One Thousand
and One Nights, in bed with her lover, the prince, holds his erect
penis and threatens to cut it off with a razor while she tells the story
of Scheherazade. Thus she repeats, reverses, and parodies the central
storytelling situation and plot of the source book, where
Scheherazade is threatened by the king and saves her life by, in
addition to making love, telling stories, but stopping short every
morning at daybreak without finishing her story so that the king has
to let her live for another day in order to hear the end of the story.
Barth extends the original text to form a sequel and extracts the
comic perspective by elaborating on the source book (see also The
Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor). Coover employs a similar
strategy in his novel Pinochio in Venice that, as the dust jacket text
phrases it:

is at once a dazzling postmodern tour de force and a delightful, lovingly


wicked companion volume to the original Pinochio story [...], C. Collodi´s
Adventures of Pinochio. Coover´s hero is now a very old man, a scholar
and aesthete who has learned all his civilizing lessons well and has now
returned to Italy — his homeland — and to Venice, the city that shaped
him — his ‘roots’, if you will — there to complete his final great tribute to
the Blue-Haired Fairy, his magnum opus, called simply Mamma. [...] The
result is a brilliant philosophical discourse on what it means to be human;
a hilarious and bawdy slapstick adventure, in the best commedia dell’ arte
tradition, that brings to life all Pinocchio’s old friends and enemies.
The Space-Time Continuum 311

(5) Formulaic fiction patterns, such as the fairy tale, the


Western, the detective novel and science fiction, are incorporated
into American postmodern fiction in the works of Barthelme,
Brautigan, Reed, Pynchon not only for the purpose of “connecting”
with popular fiction (see Fiedler) but also of preserving the vital
energy of the aesthetic text against the danger of its being stereo-
typed as coherent symbolic structure. What Elkin finds “in popular
culture” is “immense energy” (LeClair and McCaffery 118). These
formulaic forms fit into the general postmodern program of
depthlessness, which is a strategy against aesthetic closure, but they
do not fit the technique of multiplying positions. This is mended by
parodying the pattern (Brautigan, The Hawkline Monster) or by
reversing it. The scheme of the detective model “normally” begins
with uncertainty and ends in certainty; in the postmodern novel this
design is inverted. It begins with certainty and ends in uncertainty
(Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49).
(6) Plot and character are contrasted. Plot as time sequence
may be conceptualized into ritualistic trials, a rite of passage,
according to the model lives of mythic heroes, and at the same time
may be ironized when the protagonist follows the mythic hero’s
stages of initiation and development without being one himself, as
Giles does in Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy or Bellerophon in the
“Bellerophoniad” (Chimera). Plot and character here both play with
and against one another, establishing an ironic view of patterning as
well as of character, while at the same time confirming the victory of
pattern over character (and individuality). The victory of pattern and
plot, however, is suspended by the negentropic manifoldness of
narration, storytelling.
(7) The dramaturgy of plot as primordial narrative force is
used, as in Barth’s LETTERS, to keep the systems of narration, of
individuality, and of life open by circulating energy, by making plot
into manifold “stories”. In LETTERS “[d]ramaturgie” is defined as
“the incremental perturbation of an instable homeostatic system and
its catastrophic restoration to a complexified equilibrium” (767). This
method of multiplication demands a combination of pattern-
construction and pattern-dissolution so that form and force or chaos
are both interrelated and relativized. Continuous repetition,
correlation, reversal, and ambiguity strive for closure and non-
closure at the same time. The blank of the open end subverts the
312 From Modernism to Postmodernism

entropy of death and gives non-closure victory by concentrating on


the partial, not the total, on the narrated situation and its
incongruencies. The multiplicity of possible stories always rela-
tivizes the actual one and initiates other versions. Thus Sukenick can
claim: “God was the omniscient author, but he died; now no one
knows the plot, and since our reality lacks the sanction of a creator,
there’s no guarantee as to the authenticity of the received version”
(DN 41). The multiplicity of versions characterizes also Coover’s
“The Babysitter” and Federman’s Take It or Leave it. The
multiplication of the ending defines Brautigan’s A Confederate
General from Big Sur.
(8) Plot becomes a psychological problem, a narrative theme,
and an operative strategy. It is conceived as something “plotted”, as
the conspiracy of an outside power, of a mysterious “They”. Lady
V. in Pynchon’s novel V., for instance, is connected with the “Plot
Which Has No Name”. This plottedness is not represented as such by
the authority of a narrator and is thus made a thematic device as in
Barth’s case, but it appears primarily as the result of the imagination
of a character, so that its actuality status as something “plotted”
remains dubious, and the character appears as possibly or even
probably paranoiac. The thematized plot and the paranoiac character
are thus substantiated and emptied at the same time, substantiated as
narrative devices (Pynchon speaks of “operational paranoia”) that
allow for concrete entanglements and conflicts, and emptied, since
plot and character may consist only of fictions within fictions.
“World” and character therefore become discontinuous. Pynchon’s
novels V., Gravity’s Rainbow, and The Crying of Lot 49 are the best
but not the only examples.
(9) History may provide the plot. But then the logical pattern
of history that would be the basis of the plot is deconstructed (Barth,
Reed, Pynchon, Coover), by (a) placing the (universal) pattern out-
side (the chronological sequence of) time, by (b) multiplying the
patterns of cause and effect, by (c) abolishing teleology (all three in
Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow), and by (d) using “[d]esign as game.
Randomness as design” (Coover, PB 190), and thus trying to
“sabotage history. They won’t know whether we are serious or
whether we are writing fiction”(Reed; qtd. in Martin, “Clio” 21).
(10) Federman, like Sukenick, emphasizes the self-
establishment of plot and accentuates the self-building sequence of
The Space-Time Continuum 313

situations. In Take It or Leave It, quoting Aristotle on catharsis, he


reflects: “Interesting! However, since we are not interested here
(what are we a constipated race?) in plot but only travel, it is useless
to worry about such problems”. What is meant with “travel” is
explained, too: “Once the story is launched it must go on it must
follow its course however crooked it may be, even if it takes the
wrong direction” (ToL n.p.). Force here gains supremacy over form.
The model case for this version of sequentiality is Beckett’s
“Imagination Dead Imagine”. The mastery of plot is here denied; the
actions of the narrator are reduced to repetitive movements into and
out of a vague space, a white rotunda that does not allow any
measurements. The events described are uncontrollable. They are the
rise and fall of heat and cold, white and black within the rotunda,
marked by pauses, more or less long, that separate the cycle of rise
and fall. Separation is complemented with fusion; “the rise now
[being] fall, the fall rise, these in their turn to be completed, or to
stop short and mark a pause, more or less long” (“IDI” 10). The
pause is the only remnant of stability, the mediator between, and
divider of, the extremes in the rotunda, “heat and cold, black and
white”, that will rise and fall, “whereby [l]ight and heat remain
linked as though supplied by the same source of which still no trace”
(11). The text is filled and emptied by the simultaneous double
movement of deconstruction and reconstruction, which remain
without origin and aim. It is a pure example of situationalism, of
situations marked by process and pause, with scarcely any links
between the situations except for the formal, temporal but
meaningless cycle of rise, fall, and pause that constitutes the
imagination’s rhythm of the ineffable.
(11) The “plot of thought”,88 originating in the character, is
dissolved in favor of a juxtaposition of beliefs and attitudes, as for
instance, in Gass, Coover or Elkin. Innocence versus experience is a
central paradigm in Gass’s Omensetter’s Luck or Barth’s The Sot-
Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy.

6.2.3.2. Simultaneity and Succession

Sequentiality and plot build the organizational matrix of


succession. In postmodern fiction plot avoids the rationality of
stringent form by loosening up its logical design and intermixing it
314 From Modernism to Postmodernism

with the situationalism of mere succession, or with the other counter-


plan of composition: simultaneity and plurality and their “spatial”
intercrossings. “Spatial” organization, of course, is always part of the
structuring plot because of the (inter)relations that develop out of the
sequentiality of time; but for heuristic purposes, the “spatial” factors
may here be isolated as strategies of their own. In fact, types of
authors can be differentiated according to their penchant for the one
or the other, sequentiality or simultaneity. Since the narrative energy
produces the temporal process as basic line in fiction, and the time-
flow creates linearity, Barth, as already mentioned, pleads for taking
the “linearity” (together with the “visual verbality”) of fiction most
seriously, indeed, “instead of trying to defeat time, for example,
successive time, in narrative, as some writers have attempted in the
twentieth century, perhaps we should accept the fact that writing and
reading are essentially linear activities and devote our attention as
writers to those aspects of experience that can best be rendered
linearly [...] instead of trying to force the medium into things that are
not congenial to it” (Bellamy 1974, 4). He therefore asserts, “I like
plot in fiction in the same way that I like melodic music” (Bellamy
1972a, 136).
Hawkes, however, emphasizes simultaneity, characterized by
the interstice of repetition, variation, and intercrossing. In an early
interview, he notes his preference for strategies that work with
simultaneity instead of sequentiality: “My novels are not highly
plotted, but certainly elaborately structured [...] Related or cor-
responding event, recurring image and recurring action, these
constitute the essential substance or meaningful density of my work”
(123). Federman interprets simultaneity as the break-up of regular
sequence, and he translates it into the reading process. In Double or
Nothing, he advises the reader on page 127 to read the page from the
bottom up to the top, from left to right, while the next page is
supposed to be read again from the bottom to the top but now from
right to left. Gass divides contemporary fiction into two kinds: “those
who are still writing performatively and those who are not. [...] The
new mode is not performative and not auditory. It’s destined for the
printed page, [...] you are supposed to crisscross the page with your
eye, getting references and gists; you are supposed to see it flowing
on the page, and not sound it in the head. [...] Gravity’s Rainbow was
written for print” (LeClair and McCaffery 158).
The Space-Time Continuum 315

Though in addition to the organization of sequentiality, every


text builds up structures of simultaneity and plurality, what counts is
the emphasis on the one or the other, the temporal or the “spatial”
form, that counts. In fact, taking the cue from Barth’s remark about
those who are “trying to defeat time”, one could, in addition to
Thomas Wolfe’s distinction between “putter-inners” and “leaver-
outers”, distinguish between “time-followers” (Barth, Pynchon) and
“time-breakers” (Robbe-Grillet, Barthelme) in postmodern fiction,
which are positions on a scale with many transitions and
combinations. The extreme model of the time-breaking novel would
be the fictive Tralfamadorian “novel” in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-
Five. It emphasizes simultaneity instead of linearity and continuity:
“each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message — describing a
situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one
after the other. There isn’t any particular relationship between all the
messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that,
when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful
and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end,
no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our
books are the depths of many marvellous moments seen at one time”
(76). Of course, this anti-ideal to the linearity that Barth proposes as
the “natural” structure of narrative, its linearity, cannot be achieved,
and nobody would like it anyway because the force of life is drained
out of it. Even the narrator’s meta-reflection on the failing of his plot
in Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse” cannot make linearity disappear,
though theoretical reflection and practical manipulation can disrupt
and reduce, or inflate and fantasize it.
Yet the ideal course is the interaction of simultaneity and
succession. It can be perfected first by making the process of fiction
a decentered labyrinth, and, second, by pluralizing time itself not as
“real” time but as possible time. These are Borges’s strategies, which
in many ways have become models for postmodern fiction (together
with the reflexivity of Beckett’s fiction). The way a labyrinth
signifies is through both “spatial” simultaneity and temporal
succession. Borges devises the labyrinth as the spatial/temporal
model of the metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical situation of
humankind. All possibilities being simultaneous and part of an
endless succession, a labyrinth is the place, “in which all men would
become lost” temporally and spatially (Lab 22), in which
316 From Modernism to Postmodernism

labyrinthine simultaneity in space turns into infinity in time, and vice


versa. The possibilities of endless reversals make simultaneity (of
progress and regress) a dynamic process. The labyrinth is
everywhere, “an irrational universe”, “symboliz[ing] man’s in-
security” (Murillo 266), a “lack of order or apparent purpose”
(Lewald 630); and narrative reflects this state of affairs. If one
escapes from one labyrinth, it is only to run into “other, more
inextricable and heterogeneous labyrinths” (Lab 73):
I imagined it [the labyrinth] inviolate and perfect at the secret crest of a
mountain; I imagined it erased by rice fields or beneath the water; I
imagined it infinite, no longer composed of octagonal kiosks and returning
paths, but of rivers and provinces and kingdoms ... I thought of a labyrinth
of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the
past and the future and in some way involve the stars (Lab 23).

For Borges, time, like space, is always fragmentary,


incomplete, without origin and goal. All attempts to order space and
time are futile, and can only establish order as presence in absence.
Borges — in his own words — “has always been obsessed by time”
(DiGiovanni 57), not by “time given by the watch”, but “real” time,
which is possible time. The meaning of possible time is demonstrated
by Ts’ui Pên’s conception of time in “The Garden of Forking Paths”.
It combines simultaneity and succession:

In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in


a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a
growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This
network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or
were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of
time (28).

Yet there is not only an infinite series of simultaneous times, but all
times are simultaneous in the present moment, too. In “The Garden
of Forking Paths” Yu Tsun says:

Then I reflected that everything happens to a man precisely, precisely now.


Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen; countless
men in the air, on the face of the earth and the sea, and all that really is
happening to me (20).

The main point for Borges and other postmodern fictionists is that
the “net of divergent, convergent and parallel times” mixes sequence,
reversal of sequence, and simultaneity, expansion and concentration
The Space-Time Continuum 317

of times, in such a way that time eludes categorization and becomes


itself mysterious. Pynchon builds his first three novels on this multi-
facetted time pattern. In addition to Borges’s labyrinth, Beckett’s
self-reflexivity enters the program of postmodern fiction and turns
meta-reflectional. While the labyrinth achieves simultaneity in
narrative sequence (we will come back to this point later), meta-
fictional reflection aims at and attains simultaneity by juxtaposing
different discourses and by interrupting and slowing down the flow
of time. The reader simultaneously receives the story and the
reflexive break-up of the story.89 It is important that, in contrast to
the modernist novel, the strategies of simultaneity in postmodern
fiction do not replace the loss of temporal and logical/causal order
with the spatial order of cross references, symmetries, meaningful
(symbolic) parallelisms and oppositions, or rather, as we have seen,
they do it in a different way, indicating chaos within order.
The second method of negating a meaningful space-time
continuum chooses mechanical time as its absolute principle for the
organization of the text, or, more precisely, it selects mere succession
as both pattern and denial of pattern. Mechanical succession, like
mechanical simultaneity (sameness), works towards disorder, the loss
of difference, and finally towards entropy and death. When a
fictional character sees his or her life as a mere succession of
(irrelevant) moments, he or she recognizes only a senseless repetition
that lacks the spice of life, surprise, and is, out of inner necessity,
confronted with death, as is the Reverend Furber in Gass’s
Omensetter’s Luck or Papa in Hawkes’s Travesty. As in the previous
discussion of presentism, we encounter in mere succession, too, the
loss of past and present and of time’s humanizing structures. Yet the
emphasis on mere succession can also result in liberation. Aiming at
the subversion of meaningful linearity, origin, causality, and
teleology, but searching for its own form, postmodern fiction
experiments with the possibility of translating the idea of pure
successiveness into significant serial narrative structure. Such an
undertaking is difficult since it has to eliminate or transcend spatial
form, the net of interrelations that establishes a pattern of contacts
and bonds, as well as the stability of space itself, which is the most
elemental constituent of any kind of world-creating narrative process.
Space has almost automatically an illusion-building, stabilizing, and
meaning-giving quality, and it can seldom and definitely not for a
318 From Modernism to Postmodernism

longer period of time be temporalized enough without the text’s


becoming inert, uncommunicative, entropic.
Emphasis on mere succession (of words, images, situations,
ideas) and contingency used to be compensated by a specific
operational code that gave the text directions and sense. In modernist
texts the dissolution of temporal/logical/causal order into mere
sequentiality is offset by the psychological frame of reference and the
cross-references of the (symbolic) spatial order. This double frame
makes for a meaningful interaction of succession and simultaneity, as
in Joyce’s Ulysses, where the order of narrative is almost pure
temporal succession of what happens minute for minute at a certain
place and in the minds of the characters. This pure succession,
neglecting causal/logical and temporal transitions between levels of
experience, between perception, emotion, and reflection, creates
discrepancies that impede the “good” continuation of time, but it also
fashions a “spatial” and psychological structure that forces into
existence the continuity of the discontinuous and the congruity of the
incongruous. The co-presence of the following utterances appears at
first glance purely contingent:

His smile faded as he walked, a heavy cloud hiding the sun slowly,
shadowing Trinity’s surly front. Transpassed one another, ingoing,
outgoing, clanging. Useless words. Things go on the same day after day:
Squads of police marching out, back: trams in, out. Those two loonies
mooching about! Dignam carted off (344).

Yet contingency is here cancelled by the inner order of the stream of


consciousness, resting in the psychology of character. This method of
what we will call diagrammatic narration is also cultivated by
Barthelme and his followers, but postmodern fiction abandons or at
least strictly relativizes the psychological framework that is
important for Joyce and modernist literature in general. Postmodern
writers generally abandon or at least restrict interiority to the point
that it loses its identity-and structure-building wholeness; they rather
choose a non-integratable pattern of incongruity, for instance “mere”
succession, which often takes in language the form of the list,
binding together incongruent items in the mere succession of words.
As mentioned, Gass and Bartheleme are fond of such listings. In the
following passage from Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, even the
borderlines of the page appear suspended in favor of the listing of
The Space-Time Continuum 319

ever-new transformations. The latter press on in infinite succession


and seriality, abandoning in the process the finiteness of space and
limiting the possibility of creating a recognizable world with defined
relations among the items that fill the situation:

This book spill off the page in all directions, kaleidoscope of vistas,
medley of tunes and street noises, farts and riot yipes and the slamming
steel shutters of commerce, screams of pain and pathos and screams plain
pathic, copulating cats and outraged squawk of the displaced bull head,
prophetic mutterings of brujo in nutmeg trances, snapping necks and
screaming mandrakes, sigh of orgasm, heroin silent as dawn in the thirsty
cells, Radio Cairo screaming like a berserk tobacco auction, and flutes of
Ramadan fanning the sick junky like a gentle lush worker in the grey
subway dawn feeling with delicate fingers for the green folding crackle
(NL 95).

Pure succession here tends to a spatial pattern of simultaneity, but


this spatial order dissolves under the impact of the incongruous
details that do not form a picture and resist a signifying
interpretation. In this way, the syntagmatic, i.e., sequential aspect, the
immanent syntactical structure of language as opposed to its
referential and pattern-creating, “spatial” function, gain the upper
hand over meaning-building designs. In the extreme case that rejects
the psychological frame, language is finally only received as a stream
of words. Behind all this is of course the reality-language problem
and the problem of storytelling in a period of a professed or imputed
exhaustion of traditional and modernist narrative strategies. As
mentioned, Barth wrote: “This is the final test. Try to fill the blank.
Only hope is to fill the blank. Efface what can’t be faced [i.e., the
void] or else fill the blank” (LF 102). This filling of the blank finally
becomes a stuttering of fragments in an incoherent stream of words,
and the stuttering of fragments turns out to be the “emblem” (Barth)
of the artifice. In Barth’s “Title” we read:

And that my dear is what writers have got to find ways to write about in
this adjective adjective hour of the ditto ditto same noun as above, or their,
that is to say our, accursed self-consciousness will lead them, that is to say
us, to here it comes, say it straight out, I’m going to, say it in plain English
for once, that’s what I’m leading up to, me and my bloody anticlimactic
noun, we’re pushing each other to fill the blank in (109).
320 From Modernism to Postmodernism

6.2.4. Linear Time as Medium of Suspense

The linear time-frame of fiction creates suspense. Suspense


dramatizes time by focusing attention not on the past or the present
but on the future; and it initiates participation and care. It motivates
the reader’s involvement in the horizontal action/plot and the caring
identification with the characters, their problems, and their destiny.
Though suspense is a natural given, it has to be built up in narrative.
Suspense, being oriented towards the future and lacking knowledge
at the present, emerges in fiction out of the undeterminability of
action/event and the unforseeability of connections; it stimulates
curiosity and an interest in the “other”. Suspense as the apprehension
of the unexpected and unfamiliar is always based on and balanced by
the expectation of the familiar and its repetition. Conversely, the
expectation of the familiar is always tempered by the uncertainty of
the future, the fear of surprise and of the other. We expect change
because of our experience that life (as well as narrative) is not
predictable, is accidental and contingent, and is full of unexpected
turns of events. As many theorists of narrative have noted, three
temporal periods are necessary to make up a story: a condition of
equilibrium, the disturbance of the equilibrium, and the restoration of
order. This progression can go from an unsatisfactory to a
satisfactory state or from a good world to a bad one. The process
varies in the sequence of the different stages and the detailing of the
stages within the pattern. That which is “narratable”, D.A. Miller
notes, is a “disequilibrium, suspense, and general insufficiency”; the
non-narratable is “the state of quiescence assumed by a novel before
the beginning and supposedly recovered by it at the end” (ix). In
narrative, suspense is created by the fact that alternative possibilities
exist at every point in the plot. The character who acts might not
have acted, who fails might have succeeded, who accepts failure
might have reacted against it (see, for instance, Bremond and
Cancalon). Suspense is organized in the text by the forward-moving,
goal-oriented but direction-changing and continuously reoriented
plot. The energies of plot and suspense re-enforce each other in
engaging the reader’s attention and leading him or her along in
reading. But there is a difference between suspense and plot.
Suspense aims at full emotional involvement of the reader at the cost
of aesthetic distance. Plot, even the “plot of action”, and more so the
The Space-Time Continuum 321

“plot of character”, or the “plot of thought” (Crane 620), aims at


making sense.
Though suspense is oriented towards the future, it also
redefines the present and the past; it is the first step towards the
reader’s unified experience of temporality, of past, present and
future, and it opens the dimension of care, care for a character and its
fate. The experience of change and suspense dramatizes the temporal
succession and is the most important temporal link between the
natural and social frames, space-time and character-action. The
directedness towards the end, the unification of the natural and the
social frames, the direct stimulation of emotion and of identification
with the characters are of course all aspects of suspense that the
postmodern novel would supposedly avoid since they would run
counter to the ideology of dispersal, of de-unification, of dissolving
character and plot. Yet there is an irresistible elementary force in
suspense. In its rawest form it is aligned with the “body principle”,
with the materiality and vulnerability of animate bodies and
inanimate things. As both an outcome and a stimulation of desire, it
hopes for satisfaction, and fears dissatisfaction and pain. It levels
differences, hierarchies, and privileges in the intense feeling of
participation, of curiosity and “interest”, of vitalizing expectation, of
fear and hope. Suspense and its pleasures break through culture and
its controls; they are placed outside culture in the sphere of life,
nature, and desire, though they may derive from and take the form of
culture. As such an elementary force, suspense is vital for fiction,
actually indispensable. This is true also of postmodern fiction, in
spite of Sukenick’s remark that postmodernist authors, emphasizing
possibility instead of actuality in the text, allegedly are not partial to
the unitary effect of suspense, which is based on illusion and
identification (Sukenick 1985, 69).
Suspense is the dramatization of linear time that leads the
reader through the text, connecting beginning and end. It may be
transformed, ironized, even deleted (as far as that is possible), but it
is always there as a time factor to be reckoned with. In stories like
“The Indian Uprising”, Barthelme builds on suspense as a ground
factor of narrative in order to thwart it. The same is true of
Brautigan’s novel In Watermelon Sugar. Barth is typically
ambivalent in his statements. He likes “the simple appeals of
suspense, of story” (Gado 141), and cherishes “the aesthetic pleasure
322 From Modernism to Postmodernism

of complexity, of complication and unravelment, suspense, and the


rest” (Bellamy 1974, 7); but he also plays with them. He is especially
inventive in using and deconstructing suspense. He makes suspense
the basis of the story in “Night-Sea Journey”, where, as mentioned
above, a spermatozoon, on its way through the vagina towards the
egg-cell, looks forward towards, full of fear and suspense, and loudly
protests against, his impending death. In the story “Title” from Lost
in the Funhouse, Barth speaks of suspense derisively from the meta-
level of reflection; “Do you want to go on, or shall we end it right
now? Suspense. I don’t care for this either” (103). However, in the
title story of Lost in the Funhouse, the metafictional reflection holds
that all stylistic, psychological, and philosophical interruptions
subverting the flow of time or bringing it to a halt and impeding
suspense cause impatience in narrative. In other cases Barth both
employs and deletes suspense by “repeating” suspense-rich stories,
making them into foils for his own stories, as in The Last Voyage of
Somebody the Sailor, where he exploits the legendary voyages of
Sinbad the Sailor from The Tales of One Thousand and One Nights.
Postmodern fiction often uses suspense in order to play with and
work around it.
If one dispenses with the tradition that a story must come to
an end, suspense becomes free-floating, in a way “abstract”, because
it has lost its destination, which is very much part of its being.
Hawkes, for instance, “fictionalizes” suspense: the actual status of
the planned suicide and the suspense raised in Travesty is unclear,
since the suicidee who should be dead is still able to tell the story of
his and his companions’ imminent death. Pynchon is the postmodern
author who most “seriously” and productively makes use of suspense
by employing the pattern of the quest in all his novels. He sets a
beginning, even gives motivations though in a diffused, not quite
“satisfactory” way, fills the stages of the quest with movement,
action and reflection, but disperses the goal, as in Crying of Lot 49
where it is uncertain whether the Tristero Countercultural
Communication System searched for by Oedipa is merely a fiction
caused by paranoia or an “actual” organization. In Gravity’s
Rainbow, suspense is fed by a full gallery of characters and
numerous plots, all of which, however, come to nothing, with the
rocket, the goal of Slothrop’s search, finally being suspended above
the movie theater. In V., where the goal of the quest, the Lady V.,
The Space-Time Continuum 323

dissolves as character and expands into many selves, and the quester
does not really want to reach his goal, the Lady V., in order not to
abandon suspense and come to a standstill (surprise being the signum
of life, according to Pynchon), though he does not even know if the
motivation for the quest is mere fiction or based on something actual.
In all these cases, especially in Crying of Lot 49, and also in
Brautigan’s The Hawkline Monster, suspense is based on the pattern
of the detective novel. It is employed as a plot structure in order to be
played with and reversed (Tani 149).90 While the detective novel
moves from disequilibrium to equilibrium, the detective pattern in
postmodern fiction advances from equilibrium to “disequilibrium,
suspense and general insufficiency” and is thus made “narratable”
(Miller 19). There are four ways suspense and plot are correlated.
Either the two are combined, interrelated as in Pynchon, though not
quite in the traditional way since the generator of suspense cannot be
defined in a satisfactory way; or plot is drained of suspense as in
Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar or the invasion of meta-reflection;
or suspense is never focused enough to result in a plot as in
Burroughs’s Naked Lunch; or both plot and suspense are suspended
as in many of Federman’s and Sukenick’s novels or in play with
verbiage as in Barthelme’s “Sentence”.

6.2.5. Cyclical Time as Cosmic Order, as Myth, and as Repetition


of the Familiar: Barth, Beckett, Gaddis, and Reed

The cyclical model of time has come to complement the


linear one, not only in postmodern fiction but also in certain versions
of literary history, for instance, in the evaluation of the relationship
between modern and postmodern literature. Jean-François Lyotard
argues surprisingly that the postmodern “is undoubtedly a part of the
modern [...] A work can become modern only if it is first
postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its
end but in the nascent state and this state is constant” (1984c, 79).
Postmodern in this sense is a disruption of totality in favor of a
plurality that has to precede the (modernist) attempt at totality and
remains a part of it. In this argument, postmodernism would not only
precede modernism but also follow it, since the modernist ideology
of order, being not “eternal”, would call up as a reaction the
postmodern dissolution of its order of wholeness (cf. Lyotard: “Let
324 From Modernism to Postmodernism

us wage a war on totality” [1984c, 82]). This cyclical argument is


related to the Russian Formalists’ idea that periods of literary growth
and maturity are followed by periods of decay before, with the
parody of the old, a new cycle begins. Contrary to Lyotard, Eco does
not concentrate on the stage that precedes modernism but on the one
that follows it, both modernism and postmodernism now being
understood as general movements that repeat themselves cyclically in
history. Each historical period develops a cycle of modernist art with
an avantgarde that overthrows the past and writes hermetic texts,
creating as reaction to mannerisms of the past a postmodern aesthetic
of enjoyment that pleasurably revives the relation to past styles,
avoiding simple repetition by ironic turns.
This cyclical thinking is also the source of aesthetic
programs, as John Barth demonstrates, who, taking his lead from
Borges, sees the historical process in terms of exhaustion and
replenishment, and transfers the cyclical model to his own writing.
The “used-upness of certain forms” (1984, 64) is countered by their
replenishment, which from a self-reflexive imitation and
transformation of the used-up materials and methods. The right way
for fiction could be “the deliberate imitation of a novel” (72),
imitation of preformed material by general parody. As Barth has said
with respect to The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy (and in
reference to the eighteenth century novel and its omniscient Author
with a capital A), he writes “novels which imitate the form of the
Novel, by an author who imitates the role of Author” (72). For him
“it might be conceivable to rediscover validly the artifices of
language and literature — such far-out notions as grammar,
punctuation ... even characterization! Even plot!” (68) The cyclical
model is also pertinent to Barth’s own texts. Since he cannot
represent reality directly, can only fabricate artificial versions or
rather stories of reality, he finds himself “going in circles, following
my own trail” (Ch 18). This “going in circles” includes in LETTERS
the recycling of his own characters (and narrative energy) from his
previous texts to keep the system open in an ever-new, negentropic
process of telling stories. Barth in the “Frame-Tale” in Lost in the
Funhouse refers to the Moebius strip as a metaphor for this cyclical
kind of fiction, asking the reader to cut out the sentence “ONCE
UPON A TIME THERE WAS A STORY THAT BEGAN” and turn
it into a Moebius strip, which is a strip turned a half twist (180
The Space-Time Continuum 325

degrees) with the two ends connected, creating a one-sided surface


on which one may go from inside to outside without leaving the
single surface. The Moebius strip is used by Lacan as a metaphor for
the impossibility of “language to refer to anything outside itself”
(172). In Barth, the cyclical model also refers to intertextual relations
in general, and the return to the source, the origin; indeed, “no one
has claim to originality in literature; all writers are more or less
faithful amanuenses of the spirit, translators and annotators of pre-
existing archetypes” (1984, 80). As Eliade states, “[t]he return to
origins gives the hope of a rebirth” (1968, 30), and accordingly the
genie in the “Dunyazadiad” in Chimera tells Scheherazade and
Dunyazade that he “aspired [...] by some magic [... to] go back to the
original springs of narrative” (Ch 17), and to come back with new
energies and new insights.
But the image of the circle has ambiguities. In nature it is the
image of return, rebirth, rejuvenation, eternity. In culture it has also
the negative note of repetition, of going in circles, of exhaustion.
This may be one reason that Barth employs various metaphors for the
cyclical mode. He adds to the Moebius strip the echo, the labyrinth
and especially the spiral. The spiral (adding to the circle the up-and-
down movement) becomes an important spatial/temporal
configuration in Chimera where the victory over time by narrative
and the constitution of some kind of immortality is the central theme.
In “Perseid”, one of the three tales in Chimera, not the linear time-
concept wins out, but the cyclical one, varied, however, by the spiral
version. Yet the cyclical time-concept symbolized in the spiral is no
longer existentialized by the “moment of being” or by a “revelation”
that opens the mind to the essential and universal forces of life and
culture, as in modernist texts; it is here transferred from existence
into narration, though it appears under a cosmic perspective, too. The
Greek hero Perseus gains his immortality not as a man but as a
constellation of stars. However, to gain and retain this state of
permanence, Perseus, in the shape of the star constellation named
after him, has to become a narrator, who tells his tale, the time-bound
story of a mythic hero. By out-tricking, as it were, the universal law
of time, under the auspices of the narrative “as-if”, the artifact, the
human creation, links up with the eternity of the universe in a mythic
star formation named by humans. The star constellation as a
substance, however, must again be dissolved into the process of
326 From Modernism to Postmodernism

narration in order to persevere: “to be the tale I tell to those with eyes
to see and understanding to interpret; to raise you up forever and
know that our story will never be cut off, but nightly rehearsed as
long as men and women read the stars” (Ch l42). Only the story is
negentropic, can guarantee survival.
The way to surmount time is finally a combination of myth
and storytelling, both of which are intimately interrelated as
elemental forms of force and connect the individual with the
collective past. Going back “to the very roots and springs of story”
(Ch 36) also entails a return to the roots of myth, for “[t]he myths
themselves are produced by the collective narrative imagination (or
whatever), partly to point down at our daily reality” (Ch 333). A
comparison with the modernist use of myth demonstrates the change
in its deployment in postmodern fiction. Modernists like Thomas
Hardy, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D. H.
Lawrence, William Faulkner, or Thomas Wolfe revert to a cosmic-
cyclical time-concept related to myth in order to transform time from
the worn-out linear notion of progress and use into a universal power
beyond human reach. It would appear that the postmodern authors
could have no use for this synthesizing power of cyclical nature,
which had exhausted itself as a meaningful frame of reference at the
latest by the end of the Thirties. The postmodernists, however, re-
activate myth, but with their own formula, which is the breaking of
form and pattern. In Barth and others, myth is no longer understood
in terms of the mythical method that T. S. Eliot in his review of
Joyce’s Ulysses demanded of all modern literature, i.e., to use or to
create a mythical order as foil against which the wasteland of our
time shows more clearly (1923). An antique myth is not contrasted
against the social and individual wasteland in a dualistic scheme of
order vs. disorder, of mythical order against the alienating state of the
current world, but is used as a constructionist model, with an intrinsic
value only as both aesthetic form and force.
When linearity and history are considered emptied forms, the
cosmic order, the circular course and the rhythmical phases of nature,
i.e., the integration of “dynamization” and “staticization of time”
(Eliade)91 in mythical thought, become attractive for their potential to
include persistence in succession and vice versa, to balance form and
force in equilibrium. Mythical configurations, not being
rationalizable in simple uni-logical terms, represent basic (narrative)
The Space-Time Continuum 327

force and mirror elemental energies and desires. In order to avoid


only repeating the antique myths, postmodern texts overform and
aestheticize them as operational constructs by another elemental
force, storytelling. Both are kindred spirits, deriving from the same
source, the imagination, “the collective narrative imagination”, “the
very roots and springs of story” (Eliade). In the process, storytelling
gains for itself both the form and force of myth, without losing the
ability to manipulate and fabricate it as material that can be layered
with additional perspectives, played with, ironized, and parodied,
without losing its basic effect of being force as form, form with its
own system of order that keeps open the ineffable.
If the force of myth and the force of storytelling mutually
empower each other, one may think of making storytelling itself a
myth. Ambrose Mensch, one of the main characters in LETTERS,
proposes to the author the project LETTERS, which is thus born
inside the fiction by a kind of inner frame-tale, and attains the status
of a myth, an “Escalation of echoing cycles into ascending spirals =
estellation: the apotheosis of stories into stars” (Let 768). This
intricate method of creating relations is an abstraction of what Barth
does in the “Perseid” (Chimera), where myth and storytelling support
each other but are still separated. The myth of Perseus attains
duration in a star constellation, but Perseus, in order to keep up his
status as mythic hero, has to come down every night and tell his
story. Myth itself can be split into the ritual form of myth and its vital
force, and while form and its rigid ritual may be ironized and
parodied, the enlivening force can be affirmed and made the source
of narrative energy. In Giles Goat-Boy, the mythic-religious hero of
the title repeats the initiation ritual of a mythic hero and, following
the mythic pattern, breaks up the stifling rationalistic traditions of the
university, which, using the similarity of the words, is made to stand
in for the universe, and advances to hero, martyr, and Grand Tutor, a
kind of prophet and philosopher. In the process, however, he also
shatters the mechanical prescriptions of the mythic scheme and
expands to the openness of unpatterned individual experience —
before becoming a radical pessimist who recognizes the power of
repetition, the inevitable ossification of force by the system.
Giles comes face to face with the realization of the stifling
cyclical return of the same and the abstraction of everything
particular into the system of generalities, of the rationalities of reason
328 From Modernism to Postmodernism

or myth. Barth says: “Stories like Giles which seem to contradict and
then to contradict the contradiction — obviously those are not real
contradictions, just the final workings out of the pattern” (Ziegler and
Bigsby 27). Mythical pattern and cyclical time in the first half of the
circle lead to regeneration, but in the second half to failure and
deadening repetition — except that narrative keeps everything open.
Storytelling has the last word as vitalizing instance. The force of
narrative again relativizes Giles’s negative position. His final
statements are enclosed in frames of tapes and aftertapes, i.e., in
further narratives, which call in doubt the authenticity of any kind of
final statement and escalate “the echoing cycles into ascending
spirals”; yet the tension between deadening circles and revitalizing
spirals is maintained. In the attempt to trick out the teleological
perspective of time, fiction increasingly acts as a force using other
forces, and creates fiction upon a fiction upon a fiction, ad infinitum.
Though it is Barth who pronounces the conviction most clearly, it is
the ultimate credo of all postmodern fictionists: the belief in the
energy of renewal present in language and in storytelling, in the
redestributability of stories and myths, in fragmentation and
montage, creative re-montage of fragments of the story (or stories),
or in the force of words and word formations on the page: “Entropy
may be where it’s all headed, but it isn’t where it is; dramaturgy [of
storytelling] is negentropic, as are the stories of our lives” (Let 768).
And, since “dramaturgy” makes the stories of our lives, “the truth of
fiction is that Fact is fantasy: the made-up [ever renewable and
multipliable] story is a model of the world” (Ch 256).
The contrast between myth and humanized historical time is
repeated in the opposition between cyclicality and linearity of time.
In Gaddis’s JR, the writer Jack Gibbs points to an important level of
meaning in the novel when he says to Major, “one of the
preSocratics, Major, the rule of love and the rule of strife in the
cosmic cycle of Emp” (48), referring to the cosmology of
Empedocles, its model of order and chaos, and the eternal return of
the same under the dominance of the divine forces of love and hate.
While love connects the elements — fire, air, water, and earth — in
stability, hate separates and antagonizes them, producing chaos. It
seems to be the phase of chaos that reigns the present in the book
where the cosmic cycle of Empedocles is misunderstood as “comic
cycle” (48). The line over the main entrance of the school is thought
The Space-Time Continuum 329

to be “a fragment from the second generation of his [Empedocles’s]


cosmogeny, may be even the first” — “When limbs and parts of
bodies were wandering around everywhere separately heads without
necks, arms without shoulders, unattached eyes looking for
foreheads” (45).92 In Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, this concept of
cyclicality is made to express the confrontation of (white) civilization
and nature, mind and body, consciousness and unconsciousness,
regulation and liberation, power and resistance, thought and action.
The so-called Jes Grew conspiracy — a fantasized black or black-
power movement subversive to the mainstream white establishment
and expressing itself in dance, Ragtime, Jazz, Blues, slang — is
turned into a universal force: “Jes Grew has no end and no
beginning. It even precedes that little ball that exploded
1000000000s of years ago and led to what we are now. Jes Grew
may even have caused the ball to explode. We will miss it for a while
but it will come back, and when it returns we will see that it never
left. You see, life will never end [...] They will try to depress Jes
Grew but it will only spring back and prosper” (233). Accordingly,
“Time is a pendulum. Not a river. More akin to what goes around
comes around” (249).
Finally, the model of cyclicality can be transferred to the
materiality of the book itself. While a narrative like Finnegans Wake
has no ending but cycles back to the beginning both in terms of
language and world, Federman or Sukenick’s radically deconstructed
texts formalize this cyclical model of the end returning to the
beginning. They begin from nowhere and end nowhere, actually have
no “beginning, middle, or end”. Something rises out of nothing and
returns to nothingness. The texts begin and end in emptiness, on a
white page; the book fills the space in-between, as will be demon-
strated below, by succession and simultaneity, by repetition or
digression, and circles around the problematics of its own artistry.
This is like a copy of life and experience. The reader is called upon
to complete the reading of a text that refuses completion and
interpretation and makes a point of leading from nothing to some-
thing to nothing. The nothing-something-nothing-cycle, and the
absence-presence-absence, or surface-depth/void-surface figurations
connect here with the force-form-force pattern. All of them are at the
basis of postmodern narrative and give it its dignity.
330 From Modernism to Postmodernism

The cyclical time-scheme instigates both renewal and


repetition. In postmodern fiction, they stand in a dialectic
relationship without synthesis, as the end of Giles Goat-Boy
demonstrates. In many modern texts, i.e. in Hardy, Conrad, D.H.
Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Faulkner, or Hemingway, the cyclical
model is a viable model of renewal, or it stimulates the confrontation
with enigmatic and ineffable life. Between modern and postmodern
texts, however, Beckett changes narrative ideological and method.
Beckett is famous for repetition as a compositional matrix that
signifies exhaustion. In his dissertation Federman writes that
Beckett’s characters “begin and end their fictional journey at the
same place, in the same condition, and without having learned,
discovered, or acquired the least knowledge about themselves and the
world in which they exist” (1965, 4). Repetition, the “abbreviation”
of cyclicality, becomes a formative principle in postmodern fiction
because it is, so to speak, the “exhaustion” aspect of life and
literature, while cyclicality and the spiral are the “replenishment”
factors of the story in narrative and in our life. The postmodern
narrative principle of simultaneity places the one beside the other.
The final insight is that one cannot be quite sure which will
ultimately win, circle or spiral, exhaustion or replenishment, in
narrative as well as in life.

6.2.6. Psychic-Existential Time: Beckett, Elkin, Barth, Didion,


DeLillo, Gass

Psychic-existential time is the temporal continuum


experienced in the stream of consciousness. It shifts from present to
past and future and back, connecting hopes and fears with
remembered or projected instants of time.93 Essential for this kind of
mental time are: the cancellation of chronological sequence; the
experience of the simultaneity of past, present and future; and —
especially important for modernism — the existentially meaningful,
enraptured moment. It is the “epiphany” (James Joyce), the moment
of “recognition” and “revelation” (Joseph Conrad, Henry James), the
“moment of being” or “vision” (Virginia Woolf), or “some moving
passionate moment of the human condition distilled to its absolute
essence” (William Faulkner; qtd. in Jelliffe 202), which overcome
the fleeting and meaningless stream of mechanical time through
The Space-Time Continuum 331

psychic duration (see Béja). This ecstatic feeling of timelessness is


on the level of consciousness often the counterpart of the notion of
cyclical cosmic time, which in its essence is also timeless, since it
knows no irreversible linear progression, no beginning and no end
but only rhythmical phases and the rejuvenating certainty of ever
new beginnings.
It might seem obvious that this meaning- and identity-giving
moment of ecstasy is rather meaningless for postmodern writers, that,
in fact, aesthetics has lost its link with ecstasy altogether. Yet this is
only partly true. Deconstruction and reconstruction balance and
adjust. The first traces of the deconstruction of the visionary moment
are already noticeable in Joyce’s novels.94 In fact, the aspect of the
absurd, i.e., the meaninglessness of the universe, was always inherent
as a possibility in the moment of evidence. In the visionary moment
and its epiphanic identification with the universal, Beckett, Camus,
Adorno, Merleau-Ponty, and others knew of the inclusion of this
experience of the absurd in that of absolute evidence (see, for
instance, Merleau-Ponty 1962, 343). Deception already qualifies the
promise of absolute meaning in Joyce’s The Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Man. In Molloy, Beckett activates the absurd in the
experience of absolute meaning. The individual is no longer able to
identify emotionally and intuitively with something meaningful
outside or inside. He feels walled into a prison of consciousness and
language. His contact with the world produces only the encounter
with “nameless things” and “thingless names”. Since the relatedness
between subject and object is the precondition for a sense of the
“real”, the loss of this relatedness produces the sense of the fantastic.
The quasi-epiphany that Beckett depicts marks the uselessness of the
intention to go beyond oneself and “connect”, and thus, instead of
creating the moment of evidence, of absolute meaning, it announces
the end of the process of separation and fusion between subject and
object that lies at the base of sense-making:

And there was another noise, that of my life become the life of this garden
as it rode the earth of deeps and wilderness. Yes, there were times, when I
forgot not only who I was, but that I was, forgot to be. Then I was no
longer that sealed jar to which I owed my being so well preserved, but a
wall gave way and I filled with roots and tame stems for example, stakes
long since dead and ready for burning, the recess of night and the
imminence of dawn, and then the labour of the planet rolling eager into
winter, winter would rid it of these contemptible scabs. Or of that winter I
332 From Modernism to Postmodernism

was the precarious calm, the thaw of the snows which make no difference
and all the horrors of it all over again. But that did not happen to me often,
mostly I stayed in my jar which knew neither seasons nor garden. And a
good thing too. But in there you have to be careful, ask yourself questions,
as for example whether you still are, and if no when it stopped, and if yes
how long it will still go on, anything at all to keep you from losing the
thread of the dream. For my part I willingly asked myself questions, one
after the other, just for the sake of looking at them. No, not willingly,
wisely, so that I might believe I was still there. And yet it meant nothing to
me to be still there. I called that thinking. I thought almost without
stopping, I did not dare stop. Perhaps that was the cause of my innocence
(Moll 49).

Time is here represented in a state approaching absolute inertia.


Though entropy is a “fact”, it is still resisted by “thinking” and
dreaming.
In postmodern fiction, the moment of revelation, of vision is
still important. It marks crucial points of significance, but it can no
longer be introduced without being relativized in its meaning, in fact
ironized as deception, or seen as something that is so rare that it can’t
be reckoned with, is even lost because surface experience obscures
our sense of reality and its depth. In almost all cases, the quality of
the moment of being changes towards the trivial, the mechanical, the
deceptive. It loses its liberating, saving power; its meaningfulness is
restricted to the moment itself without meaning-giving after-effect;
or, if it is not just a deception, it is paradoxical in a new way. What in
modern narrative had the quality of absolute being, knowledge,
communication, never to be lost, turns here into a dubious
experience, whose truth is partial at best, is relativized by other
experiences or additional perspectives, becomes one of multiple
discourses. The reasons for the loss of the moment of absolute
evidence vary. They reach from outer or social circumstances to the
inner state of the self, to the universal state of reification. In Gaddis’s
novel about art, The Recognitions (a book that shows modernist
traces of existential dismay and bewilderment ), this moment of
recognition is still “valid”, but it is already isolated as the test of
aesthetic apprehension, a field of experience that is now alone in
being able to stimulate the feeling of revelation because it no longer
resides in nature. But this moment of aesthetic recognition is
obstructed by the outer circumstances of social routine and
corruption so that one “can’t see freely very often, [...] maybe seven
times in a life” (Rec 102). Wyatt, whose artistic ambition is turned
The Space-Time Continuum 333

from creating original art into the art of counterfeiting old art because
original art appears no longer possible for him, experiences the
moment of revelation in looking at a Picasso painting after he
himself has finished, in a spirit of humble devotion, a perfect copy of
an old Flemish painting:

Yes but, when I saw it [the Picasso painting], it was one of those moments
of reality, of near-recognition of reality. I’d been ... I’ve been worn out in
this piece of work, and when I finished it I was free, free all of a sudden
out in the world. In the street everything was unfamiliar, everything and
everyone I saw was unreal [...] When I saw it all of a sudden everything
was freed into one recognition, really freed into reality that we never see,
you never see it [...] you can’t see freely very often, hardly ever, maybe
seven times in a life (102).

In Elkin’s books, the moment of vision is crucial because it


is a means of condensing in an instant of time the paradoxical
contradictions of belief and truth. In The Dick Gibson Show, Dick
experiences an ecstatic moment of revelation that draws together
contradictory impulses into a false unity and therefore is deceptive. It
transforms him, the radio voice of the ordinary, into the extraordinary
mythic embodiment and programmer of the ordinary, and thus lifts
him into something more than the ordinary, a hero state. This,
however, is an illusion to be corrected by his experience with his
audience, by the influx of their private concerns, pains, and
obsessions. The protagonist watching the play of lightning and
thunder through the window of his brother’s solarium has the
ironized feeling that

[i]t was as if he were flying in it. He thought of radio, of his physics-


insulated voice driving across the fierce fall of rain; it seemed astonishing
that it ever got through. Now, though he was silent, it was as if his
previous immunities still operated, as if his electronically driven force
pulled him along behind it, a kite’s tail of flesh. He stood in the sky. He
raised his arm and made a magic pass. “This is Dick Gibson”, he
whispered, facing the thunder, “of all the networks, coast to coast” (248-
49).

Finally, in Elkin’s The Franchiser, the paradoxical


contrariness of the ecstatic moment is radicalized into a fusion of
objective falsity and subjective truth. The protagonist is another
believer in, and promoter of, the ordinary, the standard American
334 From Modernism to Postmodernism

lifestyle. At a crucial point of his career as franchiser of Travel Inns,


when things no longer develop as planned, he looks at the map of the
United States that designates the locations of the other Travel Inns,
and, in spite of the contrary facts, has his personal vision of
unlimited expansion. He thinks of “loops of relationships” and feels
himself to be at the center, wherever he is:
He is equidistant from the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico and Pine
Bluff, Arkansas, and Centralia, Illinois. He could as easily be in
Columbus, Ohio, as in Petersburg, Virginia. New Orleans rings him,
Covington, Kentucky, does. He is surrounded by place, by tiers of
geography like bands of amphitheater. He is the center. If he were to leave
now, striking out in any direction, northwest to Nashville, south to Panama
City, Florida, it would make no difference. He could stand before maps
like this one in the other Travel Inns. Anywhere he went would be the
center (332-333).

But his vision is a symptom of his disease, multiple sclerosis: “It was
the start of his ecstasy attack” (333). In his final revelation, however,
he achieves a synthesis between role and self. He feels himself to be
everywhere, which is now, at the end of his life, both a self-deception
and a consoling personal reality. He has lived his vision; whatever its
“objective” validity, it is his subjective truth.

Ben Flesh himself like a note on sheet music, the clefs of his neon logos in
the American sky. All the businesses he’d had. The road companies of
Colonel Sanders, Baskin-Robbins, Howard Johnson’s, Travel Inn, all his
franchises. Why, he belonged everywhere, anywhere! In California like
the sound of juice, Florida like the color of sunlight, Washington and
Montana like the brisk smell of thin height, and Missouri like the neutral
decent feel of the law of averages (342).

John Barth again employs the moment of vision for the highest
fusion of truth and falsity, the sharpest concentration on the
ambivalence of knowledge, the ironization of absolute evidence. We
have already discussed the moment of final ecstatic abandon that
characterizes the spermatozoon’s entering of the egg-cell after its
“night-sea journey”, a fusion which is both the confirmation and
relativization of existential synthesis. In The End of the Road and
The Sot-Weed Factor, a tantalizing cosmic view called “cosmopsis”,
a life-threatening malady, a paralysis of the will, befalls the pro-
tagonists. It is the ironic inversion of the romantic and modern
epiphany, the moment of recognition, recognition here of the infinity
The Space-Time Continuum 335

and equality of possibilities, that makes the choice of the actual


inauthentic, indeed impossible. In Giles Goat-Boy, the existential
moment of revelation is the moment of lovemaking that takes place
in, and is thus framed by, the giant computer. After trials and
tribulations the hero holds Anastasia in his arms. The first embrace is
a ridiculed failure. Trying to solve one of his mysterious tasks as a
mythical hero, i.e., “to see through her ladyship”, Giles looks through
her with the help of X-rays and sees her as a mechanized organic
object. This is the result:
“Anastasia ..”. The name seemed strange to me now, and her hair’s rich
smell. What was it I held, and called Anastasia? A slender bagful of meaty
pipes and pouches, grown upon with hairs, soaked through with juices,
strung up on jointed sticks, the whole thing pulsing, squirting, bubbling,
flexing, combusting, and respiring in my arms; doomed soon enough to
decompose into its elements, yet afflicted in the brief meanwhile with mad
imaginings, so that, not content to jelly through the night and meld, ingest,
divide, it troubled its sleep with dreams of passèdness, of love.
She squeezed more tightly; I felt the blood-muscle pumping
behind her teat, through no governance of Anastasia. My penis rose, unbid
by George; was it a George of its own? A quarter-billion beasties were set
to swarm therefrom and thrash like salmon up the mucous of her womb;
were they little Georges all?
I groaned. “I don’t understand anything!’ (616)

His understanding of his assignment is here ironized as


mechanical. The consummating moment occurs only later, again, in
the “womb” of the computer, in a comic enclosure of the existential,
orgiastic act. The mechanical shell, the computer, parodies both the
act of lovemaking and the psychoanalytical obsession with the
human wish to return to the womb, to security; and, as almost always
in this novel, it ironizes the literary cliché, in this case the motif of
seeing in blindness:

“Wonderful!” I cried. For though the place was lightless, and my head
pursed, in Anastasia I discovered the University whole and clear. (672)

Parody here exposes the “clichéness” of the (modern) moment of


being. But there is no ersatz for its “shock of recognition”, here the
rapturous unity of experience, the fusion of the ecstasy of love and
the sense of being an integral part of the universe “whole and clear”.
It is in fact this crucial meaning-giving moment of love from which
Giles derives his new philosophy of spontaneity, vivacity, and love
336 From Modernism to Postmodernism

that changes his whole life and that of the campus as well, though not
for good.
Gass’s The Tunnel not only provides a further example of the
separation of discourse and phenomenon in the presentation of the
moment of being, it also gives an explanation as to why the moment
of evidence no longer works and why the modern concept of
epiphany is an illusion. When the protagonist, Kohler, refers to the
“most melting moments” (562), he speaks of sexual intercourse; his
following reflection about its significance explains not only why the
sexual climax, but in fact the moment of being in general, in all its
forms, bodily and spiritual, loses its meaning:
So ecstasy has made a laughingstock of me once or twice. But that is not
why it cannot be forgiven. Nothing that intense, nothing that genuinely
profound, whatever it looks like on the surface, should be certifiably
counterfeit [...] the emotion [is not] unreal. Oh, no. It happened. I was, as I
am sure you were (when you were), transported. What was illusory was
the feeling that it — the trip — would do the soul some service (560-61).

This is the final word on the moment of being. As in most other cases
that touch on modern convictions, it disillusions the modern belief in
wholeness, in totalizing meaning. The modernist idea of epiphanic
experience no longer works because it does not open up a perspective
for the soul in the time after, the life of the quotidian. Once more a
crucial paradox in postmodern literature evolves: namely that, though
postmodern fiction fantasizes world and character, it tests the self
and its craving for meaning — in contrast to much of modernism —
directly against the world of the quotidian and its relativization of
truth.
The problems that the moment of revelation creates in
postmodern fiction originate not only from the transitoriness of the
experience, its lack of consequence. The other problem lies in the
medium that leads to ecstatic identification with (universal) force, the
vehicle of the experience of absoluteness, a person, a landscape, or a
thing. They are now mere surface phenomena, have no “depth”
potential, or rather, the text lacks the depth dimension, so that the
allocation of depth to the experience of a situation, the fusion of self
and world, the wonder of things, become more strained and less
effectual or meaningful in the narrative context. This is already
recognizable in the authors of late modernism, for instance, Saul
The Space-Time Continuum 337

Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Flannery O’Connor, Iris Murdoch, or


Doris Lessing, but also in such authors between modernism and
postmodernism like Paul Auster, Joan Didion, or Don DeLillo, all of
whom still use the “moment of being” as a counterbalance to the
mere surfaceness of quotidian life. If the moment of being is to make
sense for these writers and their colleagues under the postmodern
condition, it has to contain both the claim to meaning and its
relativization or denial, i.e., it has to be “dramatized” and ironized,
which in the new fiction is more or less the same thing, or it has to be
placed on the quotidian world of things as with DeLillo.
This first case is exemplified by Joan Didion’s novel
Democracy. She begins the book self-ironically on the metafictional
plane with reflections about how to begin her novel about her
enigmatic protagonist, Inez Victor. She proposes and then rejects as a
possible beginning the revival of the by now exhausted identification
with (exotic) nature — used by the symbolist nature novel between
1890 and 1920 (e.g., Hardy, Conrad, Lawrence) — as an alternative
to identifying with exhausted civilization. Inez is dissatisfied with
her role as the wife of an ambitious politician and with the superficial
public life that those engaged in politics are forced to lead, and looks
instead for a significant personal life. Didion, the author, writes:

I have no unequivocal way of beginning it [the novel] though I


have certain things in mind. [...]
Consider that.
I have : “Colors, moisture, heat, enough blue in the air”:

Inez Victor’s fullest explanation of why she stayed on in Kuala


Lumpur is the following:

Consider that too. I have those pink dawns of which Jack Lovett spoke. I
have the dream, recurrent, in which my entire field of vision fills with
rainbow, in which I open a door unto a growth of tropical green (I believe
this to be a banana grove, the big glossy fronds heavy with rain, but since
no bananas are seen on the palms symbolists may relax) and watch the
spectrum separate into pure color. Consider any of these things long
enough and you will see that they tend to deny the relevance not only of
personality but of narrative, which makes them less than ideal images with
which to begin a novel, but we go with what we have (17).

Don DeLillo goes the opposite way: he invests the quotidian


with revelatory power. Criticizing the surfaceness of contemporary
338 From Modernism to Postmodernism

life, he notes that, as a counter-reaction, his “work has always been


informed by mystery” (DeCurtis 55). Mystery and the epiphanic
moment grow out of dealing with commonplace things in the very
place where such things would be found: the supermarket. The
infinite plenitude of goods is the new medium of the ineffable for a
moment of fulfillment. The protagonist of White Noise, a college
professor, finds “in the commonplace [...] unexpected themes and
intensities” (184). He relishes shopping in the supermarket:

It seemed to me that Babette and I, in the mass and variety of our


purchases, in the sheer plenitude those crowded bags suggested, the weight
and size and number, the familiar package designs and vivid lettering, the
giant sizes, the family bargain packs with Day-Glo sale stickers, in the
sense of replenishment we felt, the sense of well-being, the security and
contentment these products brought to some snug home in our souls — it
seemed we had achieved a fullness of being that is not known to people
who need less, expect less, who plan their lives around lonely walks in the
evening” (20).

Though this experience of things is more attenuated in its linguistic


representation than the modernist epiphanic moment would be and
has even an ironic touch to it because the “sense of replenishment” is
soon to be disturbed in the book by existential problems within the
family and the college, DeLillo himself in a comment on the book
emphasizes the glamour of things: “In White Noise, in particular, I
tried to find a kind of radiance in dailiness. Sometimes this radiance
can be almost frightening. Other times it can be almost holy or
sacred. [...] The extraordinary wonder of things is somehow related
to the extraordinary dread, to the death fear we try to keep beneath
the surface of our perceptions” (DeCurtis 63). This “extraordinary
wonder of things” provides an “existential credit”; and the “radiance
of things” in the moments of “replenishment” serves to fill the void,
to keep under the surface the “extraordinary dread”, the “death fear”,
the fear of the void that waits under the surface in all postmodern
narratives.
It is unavoidable that the moment of being is finally
transferred to the experience of language, if language is all there is.
The ecstatic experience of language results from the linguistic
imaginary. It is playfully but also seriously described in terms of
sexual love, which is obviously the only field of comparison left
The Space-Time Continuum 339

outside language for the feeling of absolute intensity. Gass writes in


On Being Blue:
such are the sentences we should like to love — the ones that love us and
themselves as well — incestuous sentences — sentences which make an
imaginary speaker speak the imagination loudly to the reading eye; that
have a kind of orality transmogrified: not the tongue touching the genital
tip, but the idea of the tongue, the thought of the tongue [...] ah! after
exclamations, groans, with order gone, disorder on the way, we subside
through sentences like these, the risk of senselessness like this, to float like
leaves on the restful surface of that world of words to come (57-58).

Though the moment of being thus has been limited in its


validity, in fact has lost much of its revelatory power, its absolute
evidence, it still serves the operational purpose of creating wonder as
an antidote to fear, even if it is relativized by irony, parody or the
comic mode. The latter have to have a substratum to direct their
viewpoint to. This is by the way a crucial reason for postmodernism
fiction’s return to the traditional and modern novel and their narrative
strategies.

6.2.7. The Ordinary and the Extraordinary, Routine and


Extremity: Elkin and Barthelme

The following discussion of the ordinary and the extra-


ordinary concludes the analysis of time in postmodern fiction. It is a
fitting conclusion since it opens the examination of time towards
character, values, and modes of living. The ordinary and the
extraordinary define and connect in fiction the two frames of the
narrated situation, the “natural” frame of space and time and the
social one of character and action/event, in their quite specific ways,
which are the two fundamental alternatives the human being has for
living and fulfilling his or her life. They define the life of the
character(s) in general terms, in terms of preference and choice, of
predisposition, chance, and destiny, which influence, even determine
this choice. The ordinary and the extraordinary specify action as
praxis-oriented or as status-changing event. They rest on the
perspectives of time, on the linear scheme, the cyclical model and the
ecstatic moment of being, and on the notions of space, i.e., closure
and openness, abiding and moving, staying within boundaries and
crossing them. They thus specify the limits of culture. The ordinary
340 From Modernism to Postmodernism

creates pleasure within the bounds of culture and stabilizes the ego,
while the extraordinary not only initiates the moment of being and
revelation but also a break with the commonplace, the negation of
comfort in convention, stability and continuity. However, the
commonplace and its opposite are not only anthropological
constants, and they not only actively define the limits, but are also
defined by the way the limits are interpreted by the culture, the way
the opposition of the known and the unknown, of form and force are
interpreted. The ordinary asserts itself in the repetition of the known
and its forms of order, in the belief that it is necessary and that there
are ways to “discipline” time, to give it shape. Repetition is enjoyed
because it reenacts the satisfactions of the past (see Freud 1989),
because it is soothing with regard to the present and allows us to see
what is coming in the future. It gives time a cyclical structure and
makes possible a simple, “natural” conceptualization of time. It is
moreover sedentary in space, adverse to change of place and
circumstances. The return of the expected ordinary is a central form
of enjoyment in all popular culture95 and explains the appeal of
formulaic fiction that arouses utmost suspense with the help of the
unknown, but works on the expectation of the known and ends with
the victory of the known and the approved, the moral principle.
The extraordinary rouses expectations, kindles the
imagination, and counteracts boredom originating from endless
repetition of the same. It favors linearity of time and its goal-directed
structure; it is oriented not towards the present but the future, not
towards satisfaction and completion but towards desire’s drives
towards the new and the other; it is willing to take risks and live in
suspense; its ideal is force, not form, though in heroic fiction it
mostly serves ultimately a moral end. The advent of the
extraordinary as something that relieves the ordinary without having
a heroic, moral purpose became feasible under various circumstances
and with different goals. It came to fulfill the individual’s desire for
the authentic and unique or the “other”, his or her rejection of the
regular, normal, the clichéd, in favor of the different. The
preconditions for this degree of free choice were that the fear of
nature had abated and that the individual was able to depend on
society. This was the case in the eighteenth century. “In Bacon’s
time”, to quote Jeremy Bentham, “in the early part of the seventeenth
century — everything in nature that was, or was supposed to be,
The Space-Time Continuum 341

extraordinary, was alarming; alarming, and in some shape or other,


if not productive, predictive at least of human misery” (qtd. in Iser
1993, 110).
Art wavers between the ordinary and the extraordinary.
Nineteenth-century English fiction might be said to favor the
ordinary, while the American fiction of Poe, Hawthorne, and
Melville esteemed the extraordinary. Modernism, in search of the
unknown, of the self and its relation to the world, of absolutes and
visions of the whole, has not much interest in the quotidian. E.M.
Forster writes in A Passage to India: “Most of life is so dull that
there is nothing to be said about it [...] and a perfectly adjusted
organism would be silent” (125). The extraordinary now lay in
confronting the truth that society concealed. Defamiliarization and
alienation were the results of awareness. Whatever the predilection
and the epistemological and ethical interests, there was no confusion
in modernism between the ordinary and the extraordinary, and the
distinction between the two did not become thematic enough to
invest much thought in the ordinary. It was always clear what should
be called ordinary and what extraordinary. The ordinary became
logical only for the (not really modern) satiric criticism of the
clichédness of values and the corruption of society.
Things change in postmodern fiction by the simple fact that
it is no longer clear what is reality and fiction. With the blurring of
borderlines the boundaries between the ordinary and the
extraordinary are also obscured. Both become fantastic. The mode of
representation obfuscates the borderlines between the actual and the
possible and makes the possible the truly actual and the actual only a
version of the possible, whether or not the author follows
minimalistic or maximalistic ways of writing. Since both the
ordinary and the extraordinary are fantasized, there are no cultural
boundaries. This means that practically all the characters act, think,
and feel in terms of breaking the limits of “normal” culture; that
obsession is no longer a trait of only the extraordinary but of the
ordinary, too; that paranoia is not a sign of psychosis but of the right
mind; that energy does not cause chaos but the establishment of new
order including disorder; that (meta)reflection is not a sign of stifling
confusion but of the force of plurality and correction; that the normal
“logic” of narration must be broken to attain true representation of
the world; that true representation has no referent outside language
342 From Modernism to Postmodernism

but creates a linguistic world; and that in fact force is form and
rationalizing form entropy. The conditions of evaluation and
attribution are radically changed, which leads to the abandonment of
clear-cut opposites, dualities, and antitheses, or rather, to the ultimate
exchange and fusion of the contradictory poles, which, as argued
above, makes paradoxical the foundational narrative form that
functions as force.
The blurring of borderlines leads to the exhaustion of the
extraordinary as the absolute of the heroic and the “grand narratives”
(Lyotard). This suggests the return of the ordinary in postmodern
fiction but also the possibility of investing the ordinary with the
extraordinary. There is a lowering of expectations, a new modesty,
the sense, in Elkin’s words, that “the entire mosaic of small
satisfactions [...] made up a life” (LE 31), that “small satisfactions”
and the routine of life must be an ersatz for “memory, pity, pride”,
the character’s “projects, the sense he had of justice [...] along with
his sense of identity, even his broken recollections of glory”. The
narrator of one of the stories in Coover’s Pricksongs and Descants
reflects, “[m]aybe it’s just that we’ve lost a taste for the simple in a
world perplexingly simple” (147), which might explain the emphasis
on violence in the stories of this collection. Furthermore, the
suspension of the reality-fiction antithesis creates a scenario, in
which, since the difference between the ordinary and the extra-
ordinary is suspended, all positions can be freely deconstructed and
reconstructed; they become, as the case may be, either equal players
or significant contrastive poles with reversible roles. Just as the idea
of reality or order is the necessary backdrop to the fantastic, the idea
of the ordinary always serves as foil to the extraordinary, and vice
versa. As mentioned, almost all the characters in post-modern fiction
are double-poled: they are ordinary, and they are extraordinary. The
two poles ironize each other; the tension between them is a source of
narrative energy, generally of the fantasizing kind. Barthelme
provides the most extreme example of demystifying the
extraordinary and transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary. In
“The Death of Edward Lear”, the protagonist invites people to his
preplanned death, which occurs exactly at the time set in the
invitations. Afterwards the people present are disappointed:
The Space-Time Continuum 343

People who had attended the death of Edward Lear agreed that, all in all, it
had been a somewhat tedious performance. [...] Then something was
understood: that Mr. Lear had been doing what he had always done and
therefore, not doing anything extraordinary. Mr. Lear had transformed the
extraordinary into its opposite. He had, in point of fact, created a gentle,
genial misunderstanding (GD 103).

The dialectic of the ordinary and extraordinary, their


synthesis, and the reversal of synthesis and roles, build one of the
matrices that create force out of (dualistic) form in postmodern
fiction by the suspension of dualism, while fiction of course needs of
course dualism as a backdrop. In Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor, Giles
Goat-Boy, and “Bellerophoniad” (Chimera), the routine and static
rules of the ordinary stand against and relativize the heroic, romantic,
and the mythical, and vice versa. The conditions of narrative are
indeed complex. In Gaddis’s JR, in a first step the ordinary business
activities are transformed quite generally into the obsession with
speculation and manipulation and attain the status of the fantastic; in
a further step a child’s manipulation of the business world, his
building an international business concern just by activities on the
telephone, crazily succeeds because he works with the “ordinary”
rules of the fantastic business world and its exclusive obsession with
greed and power, to the exclusion of the arts and humane values. The
book thus satirically and comically ironizes the incongruencies of the
“ordinary” surface-world of business, which is one-sided and
therefore inhumane. In Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, the Tristero
underground communication-system is posited as the extraordinary,
as energy, vitality, force, against the everyday life of conformity,
anonymity, and ordinary routine. But then the routine-breaking,
vitalizing, extraordinary Tristero dissolves into emptiness, the two
worlds in fact relativizing each other as something vs. (probably)
nothing, and leaving the heroine, Oedipa, in distress, in confusion,
and a state of paranoia between the ordinary and the extraordinary,
losing her sense of place. DeLillo, finally, makes the quotidian the
source of all possible aspects of life, of the interface of the familiar
and the unfamiliar, the knowable and the ineffable. In DeLillo’s
White Noise, the ordinary, the glistening consumer world in the
supermarket, by its plenitude of things and possibilities of
consumption, attains the special aura of the extraordinary, “the sense
of replenishment”, a “fullness of being”. It even creates, as men-
344 From Modernism to Postmodernism

tioned above, something like the moment of revelation and being.


With Barthelme and Elkin, the relationship between the ordinary and
the extraordinary is the basis of a discussion of, and play with values.
The antithesis of the ordinary and the extraordinary is used to discuss
indirectly that which cannot be discussed directly anymore: values,
also moral values and their dualities, the dissemination of values, the
diffusion of the dualism of true and false, right and wrong, authentic
and inauthentic.

6.2.7.1. Stanley Elkin: The Great Satisfactions of the Ordinary

The contrast and the interaction between the ordinary and the
extraordinary are the basis of Elkin’s whole work. Setting communal
against individual values, and relating the quotidian life to private
obsession, Elkin attends to a more psychological and sociological
treatment of the problem than some of his colleagues would. In a
paradoxical reversal of roles, the clichéd form of life can in Elkin’s
work be the source of force, and force can only express itself in
stereotyped form. By basing the positive evaluation of the ordinary
on the necessity of communal satisfaction, Elkin takes up the line of
thinking most prominently established by Benjamin Franklin in his
Autobiography. For Franklin human complexities were reducible to
rationalizable patterns and maxims of ordinariness. What he called “a
sort of key to life” (Autobiography 137) is, in Elkin’s words, “the
self-made, from the ground up vision of the world” (DGS 23). With
Elkin, the myth of ordinary self-reliance and the vision of the
communal world as harmony have been disrupted by an “aesthetic of
disappointment” (BM 95), based on the realization that, in Elkin’s
words, “[t]he world is strange, the world itself” (Bos 262), and that
the weakness of humankind leads to personal failures, the isolation of
the self, bodily decay. The displayed incongruencies in Elkin are
perspectivized and made multivalent by the activities of play, irony,
the comic mode, together with the aesthetic of (rhetorical) excess, of
what Irving Howe, characterizing the Jewish-American tradition as a
whole, calls “[a] yoking of opposites [...] a rapid, nervous, breathless
tempo [...] [a] hurry into articulateness [...] scrap[ing] together a
language” (1977, 15).
Elkin dissolves plot as an orderly and meaningful succession
of narrated units and disperses character in the traditional sense of a
The Space-Time Continuum 345

unique person with an identity of self. He uses characters to contrast


conceptions of life, beliefs, attitudes. (In A Bad Man, the warden
Fisher says to his prisoner Feldman: “It’s way of life against way of
life with me, Feldman” [BM 39].) Deconstructing character and
action, Elkin falls back on the natural frame of the narrative situation,
space and time, and, in fact sets time against space to situate and
make meaningful central motifs of his argument. He thus marks a
general trend, namely that, if the cohesion of character, feeling,
thought and action is abandoned, together with the wholeness and
identity of the self, the dominance-relationship between the social
and the natural frames of the situation is given up in favor of a
conceptual interplay of all four elements. In The Dick Gibson Show,
Dick Gibson, a radio announcer and talkmaster, is what one used to
call the central character; yet it is not he, rather, it is the radio that
connects all the elements, space, time, character, and action/event. It
fills the air, fills time with ordinariness; it covers space and reaches a
plenitude of people, while, however, all relations remain anonymous.
In The Franchiser it is the American landscape that is filled with
identical, ordinary manifestations of the American way of life, its
penchant for sameness and communal spirit, signified, for example,
by strings of hotels and Fast Food chains. The case in favor of the
ordinary and against the extraordinary is most clearly but also
playfully, wittily, and ambivalently made by a hitchhiker, a man
released from prison, whom Ben Flesh, the protagonist of The
Franchiser, picks up:

I been shut up with fellows like you decades. Crook, all crimes are crimes
of passion. Adventure lies in the bloodstream like platelets [...] Get a
normality. Live on the plains. Take a warm milk at bed time. Be bored and
find happiness. Grays and muds are the decorator colors of the good life.
Don’t you know anything? Speed kills and there’s cholesterol in
excitement. Cool it, cool it. The ordinary is all we can handle (Fran 220).

Contrasted to the ordinary, the common sense, the faked, or


illusionary communal spirit are the needs, the weaknesses, the
passions, and the obsessions of the self. In spite of the high regard for
the true communal spirit displayed in his books, Elkin has said:
“There is only one psychological assertion that I would insist upon.
That is: the SELF takes precedence” (LeClair 1976, 83-84). The
author accomplishes this precedence in two ways. In the first case he
346 From Modernism to Postmodernism

identifies ordinariness with “the system”, and extraordinariness with


the individual, the protagonist. In an early text like A Bad Man, the
prisoner Feldman, the “bad man”, a man with “no feel for patterns”
(180) and “without a taste for the available” (201), whose motto is,
“[s]omething was always at stake” (105), stands for the belief in the
extraordinariness of the self, for openness and possibility, for
contentiousness, resistance and struggle in a senseless universe that
is “running down” towards “entropy” (235- 36). Accordingly, he also
stands against the warden’s belief in the average, the regular, the
predictable, the rational, and communal order, in short, as the warden
calls it, “‘the system. Virtue is system, honor is order. God is design,
Grace is a covenant, a contract and codicils, what’s down there is
writing’” (64). It is a static system of basic ordinariness without
potential for enlivening change and renewal, a state of affairs, for
which the prison is a symbol, a “place of vicious, plodding
sequiturs”(52). In later texts like The Dick Gibson Show and The
Franchiser, together with The Living End perhaps his best books,
Elkin widens his view and makes the ordinary a necessary part of
self-definition and self-expansion, the self and the ordinary no longer
just battling against, but now interacting with one another.
The Dick Gibson Show focuses on the dialectics of
broadcasting, of voice and silence, voice and time, voice and
audience, on the struggle between the voice’s controlling of silence,
time, and audience and its being controlled by them, between the
myth of heroic mastery over the medium and the trivialities of just
filling silence and time. It is again the basic theme of postmodern
fiction, namely somethingness against nothingness, human
inventions against the void. These dichotomies and struggles define
Dick Gibson’s professional career as a radio announcer and
talkmaster. When “the announcer’s voice occur[s] in silence, in the
heart of an attentive vacuum disposed to hear it” (104-05), Dick
gives it a human dimension, a shape “creating a sense of the real
silence held off, engaged elsewhere” (14). Listening to Bob Hope,
Dick learns that “time [as the matrix of both the ordinary and the
extraordinary] is the battleground of radio and the enemy as well;
that he who stands up in it, as [Bob] Hope does, is a hero who has
taken on the awesome task of making himself a medium of time’s
mastery, his voice, his jokes, and his pauses ‘scheduling it, slicing it
into thirty- and sixty-minute slices’” (P. Bailey 61). He learns that his
The Space-Time Continuum 347

task is to “dispassionately enter the silence” (105) in order to tame it


and humanize it for others and be a master of it himself. The radio,
the voice of the ordinary, of communicality, which would normally
de-individualize a person, is for Dick the very medium of self-
expression and self-assertion. Though he identifies with the voice of
ordinary American well-being and feels like the champion and
symbol of the normal, he himself paradoxically wishes to transcend
the ordinary as its mythic, extraordinary embodiment, hoping his life
“‘would be as it is in myth’” (323). In a kind of comic spirit, the
various stages of Dick’s apprenticeship are modeled on the passage
of the mythic hero; they are defined by trials, but also by support
from helpers, by embarrassment and failure, but also by resurrection
and feelings of elation; yet the stage of the ultimate ordeal, the
initiation, does not lead to mastery and superiority. His life can only
be “an interminable apprenticeship”, which “he saw now he could
never end” (395). It is a confused, a medley life that he envisions,
“touched and changed by cliché, by corn and archetype and the
oldest principles of drama”, an “exceptional life [...] but familiar too,
unconventional, but riddled with conventions of a different higher
order” (131).
The drama that develops is that between communal spirit and
private obsession, between stability and instability, satisfaction and
desire. The antitheses are not centered in a character in spite of the
fact that there is a central character, Dick Gibson, but instead are
treated as abstractable attitudes, as alternative and contrasting
approaches to life, as satisfaction and dissatisfaction, as self-reliance
and self-alienation. Dick’s belief in the ordinary homogeneity of the
American people, their shared values, and the image he has of his
listeners, the ideal American family — “together in time, united,
serene” (38) — turn out to be false. In part II and part III
circumstances change with the change of the format of the talk show.
The listeners in the final two-way version of his show become
speakers, too, calling in with their problems, making “every home in
America its own potential broadcasting station, and every American
his own potential star” (283). The diversity of the voices of solitary
people, their stories of private needs, longings, obsessions fill
increasingly time, air, and silence, circling around missed chances,
frustrated connections, ungratified relationships, controlling him, the
moderator, with their patternlessness and narcissism, instead of
348 From Modernism to Postmodernism

letting him control them by fostering communal values. Reacting to


all these personal egocentric effusions on his Miami Beach “Dick
Gibson’s Night Letters”, a program created to demonstrate and
strengthen the public self and the nation’s solidarity, he laments full
of disappointment, bewilderment, and defeat:

What’s happening to my program? What’s the matter with everybody?


Why are we all so obsessed? I tell you, I’m sick of obsession [...] Where
are my Mail Baggers, the ones who used to call with their good news and
their recipes for Brunswick stew and their tips about speed traps between
here and Chicago? How do your gardens grow, for Christ’s sake? What’s
with the crabgrass [...] Have the kids heard from the colleges of their
choice? What’s happening? (383)

What Dick comes to see is that “All there is [...] are the
strange displacements of the ordinary” (274), i.e., mere self-
disclosures of isolated selves. Ironically, only “Poor Dick Gibson”,
the voice and the herald of the ordinary, “had nothing to confess [...]
his own slate is clean, his character unmarked, his history
uneventful” (274). If, as Dick claims, “the voice is the sound of the
soul”, his soul is as much a void as the air into which he sends out his
message of ordinary and communal values, and into which that
imagined community of listeners wail and scream their compulsive
confessions, private fears, and self-obsessed questions (which put
them in a line with Sherwood Anderson’s “grotesques”). Finally, into
his voice enters fear, fear of the extraordinary that can no longer be
quieted with the mottos of the ordinary of the Dick Gibson show,
“[p]lease remain calm”, “[p]lease be easy”. His life’s having failed
to turn mythic, he himself becomes a suffering self by his
unwillingness to accept the existence of different, public and private,
levels of meaning.
This psychic burden is revealed in the workings of his
imagination, which become fantastically paranoiac, just as they do in
Pynchon’s books. It comes to be hyperactively obsessed with the
figure of Behr-Bleibtreau who once disrupted his celebrity show and
who now is turned into an evanescent, all-pervasive, and potent
imaginary enemy caller seemingly bent on obstructing his show with
a destructive vision contrary to the profane, ordinary one Dick offers.
During a picnic for his listeners he keeps himself insulated from
them, fearing that Behr-Bleibtreau would appear in person to harass
him (which of course he never does). Thus the passionate
The Space-Time Continuum 349

representative of ordinariness, of American common sense and


communal spirit is disclosed, in Elkin’s own words, as “bodiless
being” (LeClair and McCaffery 121), obsessed with a fixed idea, as
the symbol of the private, isolated and obsessed selves of his
listeners, who in their compulsive individuality are the extraordinary,
but who, by the commonness of their private, compulsive selves,
ironically represent the repetitive, the ordinary so that the ordinary
and the extraordinary fuse. Elkin’s own comment on the book
underlines the paradox as the central configuration of the text: “The
paradox of the novel is that the enemy that Gibson has been looking
for all his life is that audience. [...] Dick builds up in his mind this
Behr-Bleibtreau character. That Behr-Bleibtreau is his enemy. That’s
baloney paranoia. The enemy is the amorphous public that he is
trying to appeal to, that he’s trying to make love to with his voice”
(LeClair and McCaffery 121). Behind the solidarity exhibited in the
ordinary and the communal spirit, it strives to show the world’s
terror and mysteries; the surface opens to the void. At the end Dick
has to concede defeat. He in fact aligns himself with his listeners, all
of them

blameless as himself, everyone doing his best but maddened at last, all, all
zealous, all with explanations ready at hand and serving an ideal of truth or
beauty or health or grace. Everyone — everyone. It did no good to change
policy or fiddle with format. The world pressed in. It opened your
windows (DGS 395).

In Elkin’s Living End, the tension between the ordinary and


the extraordinary gains force by the subject matter to which it is
applied, by the widening of the field of associations which includes
the opposition of the familiar and the unfamiliar, of seeming and
being, and by the plots of revelation and reversal. In the book, God,
the most extraordinary source of creativity, justice, wholeness, etc.,
turns out to be ordinary. Before destroying the world He has created,
He (rather unsatisfactorily) reveals and justifies his actions to a
crowd assembled at his gala, asking “what do you make of Me, eh?”
He goes on after a long explanation of his ways: “Who could have
gotten it all right the first time, saved everyone trouble and left Hell
unstocked? [...] Why do I do it then? Why?” The familiar answers
come from the crowd: “‘So we might choose,’ said one of the saved
[...] ‘Goodness,’ a saint shouted. ‘You get off on goodness’” (LE
350 From Modernism to Postmodernism

128-29). God’s answer casts off these notions as clichés. His own
explanation is rendered from an artist’s point of view and serves to
parody/satirize modernism’s elitist, shamanic art-ideology:

Is that what you think? Were you born yesterday? You’ve been in the
world. Is that how you explain trial and error, history by increment, God’s
long Slap and Tickle, His Indian-gift wrath? Goodness? No. It was Art! It
was always Art. I work by the contrasts and metrics, by beats and the
silences. It was all Art. Because it makes a better story is why (LE 129).

Elkin’s God-Artist (a satire on the modernist artist’s overblown self-


estimation), in spite of his high claims, is quite ordinary in His ego-
centricity, His vindictiveness; He is “a sucker for worship” (93) with
a “game show vision”, with “a thing for heights [...] a sort of majestic
Fop posed on postcard and practicing His Law only where there was
a view” (127); He is a Bauhaus artist, “a form-follows-function sort
of God” (48). Elkin, however, does not only make the extraordinary
ordinary, he also gives the ordinary the aura of the extraordinary.
Jesus says of his time on earth: “I loved it there [...] I loved being
alive” (97), and the holy Mary is described as “savoring the
ordinary” (133). God’s critics, ironically, in a further turn of the
screw, accuse Him of lacking “just ordinary earth” (127). God turns
out to be a satiric/parodic symbol of the human need for wholeness,
of the artist’s need for aesthetic control — and of the failure of both.
Elkin says in a comment on the book: “I believe in whim. I
believe in bad luck and in good luck, I believe that the world spins on
an axis made out of whim, just pure whim. The ultimate whimmer is
God”. In fact, “God is the most whimsical thing in the universe”
(Ziegler and Bigsby 102). The world was created by the whim of the
artist God and is destroyed by his “controlled whim” (Elkin). The
artist annihilates his work of art, His Creation, because: “I never
found My audience” (LE 133). That is a paradoxical statement,
because it means that, in spite of His omnipotence, God is powerless
to create believers in His creation, which is an artistic creation with
an attempted aesthetic control that fails miserably. The book, in
which “everything [...] is built on some stereotyped notion of
theology” (Ziegler and Bigsby 107), confirms what we have said
about the abstraction of themes. The themes raise fundamental
anthropological and theological oppositions, only then to blur the
borderlines, the boundaries between God’s power and character,
The Space-Time Continuum 351

between power and powerlessness, between the extraordinary and the


ordinary, the ethical and the aesthetic; and what is juxtaposed is
presented in the ironic and comic modes to produce ambivalence and
contradiction. Elkin notes: “in one way The Living End is the final
working out of whatever is comic in my fiction by being the ultimate
confrontation between all power and no power” (Ziegler and Bigsby
105); the antithesis of the ordinary and the extraordinary is a basic
co-theme of the power theme.

6.2.7.2. Donald Barthelme: The Lost Middle State

As we saw in Elkin, the ordinary vs. extraordinary paradigm


gains a dramatic potential by its extension into the oppositions of
familiar vs. unfamiliar (which adds the aspect of mystery to the
narrative argument in The Dick Gibson Show) and of being vs.
seeming, which provides surprise and imitates the plot of revelation
and the effect of the reversal of position. Barthelme goes another
way. In Snow White, he does not put a self into the center in order
then to decenter it, and he does not dramatize the contrast between
the ordinary and the extraordinary via the experience of the character
or God or the narrator. Furthermore, he does not write in “a rapid,
nervous, breathless tempo” (Howe), but rather practices a
minimalistic prose full of discrepancies, gaps, stops, a technique of
juxtaposition and omission, of fragmentation and montage that
interrupts the linearity and easy flow of the text. But he does, just
like Elkin, detach the ordinary and the extraordinary as attitudes
from the character and thematize them as such, and he chooses a
playful comic stance for a multi-perspective as well. In Snow White,
Barthelme introduces the dialectic of the ordinary and the
extraordinary into the world of fairytales (Snow White, Rapunzel,
etc.), confronts it with the current world of America, and dramatizes
the opposition of the two stances via the antitheses of boredom and
excitement, the quotidian and the visionary, equanimity and dis-
ruption, knowledge and disorientation, the simple and the complex,
the right and the wrong. They are localized in the character, in fact in
all characters of the book, a method which, however, abstracts them
from the individual psychic self and places them on a more general
thematic level, since the characters, even Snow White, show an inner
352 From Modernism to Postmodernism

life beyond utterances of confusion and complaint about both the


excitement of the extraordinary and the boredom of the ordinary.
The design of the novel is not dominated by the linear
experience of characters, as in Elkin, but by an extraordinary event,
the event of the arrival of Snow White in the place of the Seven
Dwarfs. This event changes the situation for everyone, takes away
the familiarity of life, forces everybody, including Snow White, to
adjust anew to the circumstances of the given and the
(non)adjustment to this situation shapes the “plot” of the text, which
fulfills itself, following the pre-given pattern of the fairy tales, in the
antithesis of factuality (the quotidian) and vision (the romantic and
heroic). For the seven dwarfs the arrival of Snow White is an “event”
that introduces the extraordinary into the ordinary and brings
confusion into their lives:

Before we found Snow White wandering in the forest we lived lives


stuffed with equanimity [...] We were simple bourgeois. We knew what to
do [...] Now we do not know what to do. Snow White has added a
dimension of confusion and misery to our lives. Whereas once we were
simple bourgeois who knew what to do, now we are complex bourgeois
who are at a loss. We do not like this complexity. We circle it wearily (SW
87-88).

Snow White, on the other hand, misses the extraordinary.


Borrowing from Grimm’s fairy-tale “Rapunzel”, Barthelme makes
her “recapitulate”, in a merging of fictional actuality and
metafictional consciousness, the “motif” of “the long hair streaming
from the high window [...] for the astonishment of the vulgar and the
refreshment of my venereal life” (80), hoping for a prince to appear.
Her extraordinary behavior calls forth a number of reactions. The
question is what is “the significance of this act” (92), which is a
liberating act for Snow White and a routine-breaking threatening
event for everybody else. It initiates reflections about life in all who
respond to it, including Snow White herself. She asks: “Paul? Is there
a Paul, or have I only projected him in the shape of my longing,
boredom, ennui and pain?” (102). Her answer comes finally in a
blurring of the actual fact of the present story and the recapitulation
of the remembered, quite different story:
The Space-Time Continuum 353

No one has come to climb up. That says it all. This time is the wrong time
for me. I am in the wrong time. There is something wrong with all those
people standing there, gaping and gawking. And with all those who did not
come and at least try to climb up. To fill the role. And with the very world
itself, for not being able to supply a prince. For not being able to at least be
civilized enough to supply the correct ending to the story (131-132).

The meeting between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the


quotidian and the romantic/heroic produces mere “circling”, a
blockage, entropy in behavior and thought, a circling that allows a
range of perspectives on the event and on the reactions of the people
to the event. The remarks of people are both trivial and meaningful,
philosophical (cf. the allusion to Wittgenstein) and proverbial, but
they come to no conclusion: “Leave things alone. It means what it
means” (107); “if there is anything worse than being home, it is
being out” (117); “you get a sense of ‘chain’ from these chain-like-
fence walls” (127); “[o]ur becoming is done. We are what we are.
Now it is just a question of rocking along with things as they are
until we are dead” (128); “[e]veryone wanders around having his
own individual perceptions. These, like balls of different colors and
shapes and sizes, roll around on the green billiard table of con-
sciousness” (129). The circling, the going to and fro, also affects the
dwarfs, who, on the one hand, regret the confusion that has entered
their lives with the arrival of Snow White, but who, on the other,
now reject “[n]ormal life. [...] It is unbearable, this consensus, this
damned felicity. When I see a couple fighting I give them a dollar
because fighting is interesting” (66). These are resultative statements:
they indicate a psychological irritation that, however, is not
elaborated on. The calculated discrepancy between the indicated
psychological issue and its non-psychological surface treatment
makes whatever is complex simple again, thus establishing the
contrast between issue and perspective. This discrepancy obviously
has the purpose of gaining from the loss of complexity a wider range
of viewpoints on the event and the freedom to open form for the
force of simultaneity and the gap. The attitude in Barthelme’s texts
towards the unrationalizability of life is an overlapping of rejection,
acceptance, and assent that are neutralized into an irritated restraint
and a conceptual dichotomy of complexity and simplicity; the gaps
between juxtaposed (incompatible) components and different sorts of
language leave space for the multiperspective that includes play,
354 From Modernism to Postmodernism

irony, and the comic mode — but also anxiety. Thomas remarks in
The Dead Father: “Things are not simple. Error is always possible
[...] Things are not done right. Right things are not done. There are
cases which are not clear. You must be able to tolerate the anxiety.
To do otherwise is to jump ship, ethics-wise” (DF 119).

6.3. Space and Spatial Form

6.3.1. Towards Modernism

In the eighteenth-century English novel, plot and character


are localized in a concrete place and set in a specific time; both space
and time function as coordinates of the narrated situations and their
sequence. But space and time were not necessarily particularized;
because the novels were composed more loosely, the manners of the
time were taken for granted, the characters were free to act according
to (universal) moral laws and as masters of their environment.
Reality was not mysterious or opaque; place and time did not have
the role of a determining context. Since the interest of the reader was
supposed to focus on character and plot, space and time did not have
to be detailed or given a stabilizing, meaning-giving or interesting
role. In the Gothic novel things changed. The discourses of time and
place served to set up a trap for the hero or heroine, to heighten
suspense, or to articulate the romantic ideas of the beautiful and the
sublime. With the introduction of history in the novels of Walter
Scott, who combined the “novel of manners” that he inherited from
Fielding and Smollett with the historical romance, not only the
authenticity of local color became important (which is only a
picturesque “decorative” device and cannot really awaken the spirit
of the age), but also the lasting interaction between humans and place
and time. This re-orientation among the elements of the situation
gave the novel a crucial new direction.
Georg Lukács noted that Scott’s seemingly romantic novels
were by no means so romantic but instead rested on the distinction
between different realities, or milieus. “To awaken distant, vanished
ages and enable us to live through them again he had to depict this
concrete interaction between man and his social environment in the
broadest manner” (1983, 40). Scott differentiated Scotland from
England, the Highlands from the Lowlands, on the principle of
The Space-Time Continuum 355

natural and cultural environment, the climate, regional history, social


organization, manners, and traditions. Balzac and the realists of the
nineteenth century eagerly followed the new trend of demonstrating
how ideas, feelings, and manners of behavior grow out of such basic
circumstances. Boundaries become important; time, space, and social
organization within such boundaries fuse into effective operational
principles. The growing complexity of the world in the nineteenth
century, moreover, brings about within the novel a multiplicity of
persons, plots, places, and even times, a phenomenon that intensifies
emphasis on parallelism and juxtaposition and leads therefore to a
strengthening of spatial order and its symbolic potential, and to a
foregrounding of simultaneity. Narrative now includes the extensive
description of places. Characters extend into place and time, place
and time into character. George Eliot writes: “It is the habit of my
imagination to strive after as full a vision of the medium in which a
character moves as of the character itself” (366). The maxim of
naturalism, the determination of character by milieu, which
developed in the wake of Darwinism, furthers the close alliance
between humans and space, the detailing of the social and natural
environment and its evaluation as social determinants in the French
(Zola), the English (George Eliot, George Moore) and the American
novel (Garland, Crane, Norris, Dreiser). Two attitudes toward the
environment develop that which Lukács characterizes as
“experiencing” and “observing” and, according to the form, as
“narrating” and “describing”. He polemicized at the same time
against both the latter choices (observing and describing) because
such an attitude, for which Flaubert and Zola are taken to be the chief
witnesses, is “neutral”, creates tableaux, in which the characters act
as “observers”. They are thus reduced in their status and their role
as self- and history-determining agents (Essays 1971A, 206-07). The
reader too becomes an observer of a series of “pictures”.
The modern novel interrupts this development towards
description, or rather, it demands with Henry James the dramatizing,
intensifying, and narrative integration of the pictorial elements under
psychological aspects. This would mean “a reversal of the essential
method of fiction” (Beach 38-39) as practiced in the traditional
English novels, which Henry James regarded as “great fluid
puddings” (qtd. in Booth 28). The modern novel became the
“chamber of consciousness”, depicted “the atmosphere of the mind”
356 From Modernism to Postmodernism

that, in a mutual penetration of abstract consciousness and optic


textual reality, turns “the very pulses of the air into revelations” (H.
James 1957, 31-32). Narrative ontology is changed in the works of
James (“art deals with what we see” [1962, 312]), in the works of
Conrad (“my task [...] is, by the power of the written word, to make
you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see”
[“Preface” x]), and in the works of other modernist writers. New
dominants, reflecting new kinds of sensibility, come to the fore. The
privilege of the narrator, his magisterial position “above” the world
that he narrates, is given up or reduced; the distance between
discursive statement and emotional experience is shortened. Bodily
consciousness, the pictorial detail and symbolic signification take
over the function of direct commentary, of rational and causal
interpretation of character and event. According to T.S. Eliot and
Theodor Adorno, only indirect methods that establish an “objective
correlative” (T.S. Eliot) for feeling and thought can represent the
whole experience in all its aspects, which include both conscious and
unconscious signification. Emphasizing the spatial aspect of
experience, Hemingway later will remark: “Unless you have
geography, background, you have nothing” (Antheil 218). The
aesthetic goal — to integrate all situational elements into a
significant whole — causes the modernists to reject the excess of
(unfunctional) description and its isolation in separate passages
(traditionally at the beginning of chapters) that mark the “setting” of
the characters. Virginia Woolf says that the modern novel “will tell
us very little about the houses, incomes, occupations of its characters;
it will have little kinship with the sociological novel or the novel of
environment” (Collected Essays, 1966/67, II, 255), directing her
criticism against the novels of authors like Bennett and Wells. Henry
James, Joyce, Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and others, move from
extensity to intensity, thus deepening the interrelation between
subject and object, making it in fact indissoluble. Virginia Woolf
writes: “What I want to do now is to saturate every atom. I mean to
eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole;
whatever it includes” (1973, 139). Such a fully saturated moment that
gives wholeness to experience is the visionary or mythical moment,
mentioned before. This moment of revelation suspends mechanical
time and penetrates surface. But space is also important, for this
psychic synthesis is a synthesis of the inner and the outer worlds. In
The Space-Time Continuum 357

the intensity of psychic time, the character bridges the abyss between
the inner and outer by the ecstatic feeling of totality, connecting the
deep structure of consciousness and the depth dimension of nature,
the essence of the mind and the essence of place (Conrad, Lord Jim;
Joyce, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Lawrence, The
Rainbow; Woolf, To the Lighthouse).
Time and space act as interpretative media not only by
initiating responses from the experiencing subject and by opening
ways of expressing feelings and thoughts in sensory perceptions, thus
not only by providing material for indirect methods of signification;
they also function as systems of interpretation in a complex aesthetic
structure. As our discussion of the spatial method indicated, in
modernism space becomes more important than on time. Space is the
basis of elementary bodily consciousness, the structured and
structuring stabilizer and matrix of meaning; it obtains the lead, when
the discourses of time become problematical. Having lost the
integrative wholeness of time sought by the nineteenth-century
novel, the modernist writers split time into mechanical time and
mental time. The two having become disconnected, psychological
time wars against mechanical time in order to overcome transience,
to create duration, permanence, and universality, in short, to make
sense within the new wholeness of psychic time. Under these
circumstances, the texts of Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Fitzgerald,
Hemingway, or Faulkner assign to space the role of a balancing
factor, of a sound basis for the temporally disruptive narrative
process. The novel creates meaningful constellations of places and
directions, opposite poles that function as points of reference in the
stream of consciousness, in the flow of associations between present
and past, present and future, for the quest of identity, the substance of
the self, and for the general thematic issue of transforming chaos into
order and (universal) meaning. Place turns into a polarized, but
coordinated and thematically directed environment that is not as in
the naturalistic novel a social determinant, a (stifling) milieu, but, by
being experienced as significant, becomes the receptor of feelings,
thoughts, in fact a dialogue partner and the operative principle of
human fears and hopes.
This is the case with Dublin in Joyce’s Ulysses, London in
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway; Yoknapatawpha County in
Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and more so in his Absalom,
358 From Modernism to Postmodernism

Absalom! Place offers a refuge (Forster, Howard’s End), the final


goal of a quest (Lawrence, Women in Love), an alternative
experience (Conrad, Heart of Darkness), and a dialectic relationship
(James, The Ambassadors). Or, place provides for mobility, change,
and thus for the illusion of life as something dynamic and meaningful
(Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises; Kerouac, On
the Road; Bellow, Augie March).96 Space in fact becomes a
symbolic and thematic constellation. In the American novel this
modern symbolic configuration of space already informs the fiction
of Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, or Mark Twain. In Hawthorne’s The
Scarlet Letter, the puritanical settlement with its moral rigor is set
(ambiguously) against the natural wilderness and freedom of the
forest. Melville’s Moby-Dick contrasts land and sea, the ship and the
sea, the surface and the depth of the sea, the human quest for
universal meaning and nature’s indifference. Mark Twain’s
Roughing It opposes civilization and the rough west; Life on the
Mississippi and Huckleberry Finn contrast the wilderness and
freedom of the river with the civilizational corruption on shore.
Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse plays on the interrelations
between lighthouse and sea: the island, the sea and the lighthouse;
the house and the island, the inside and the outside. Henry James’s
novels distinguish America and Europe, inexperienced, innocence
and historic experience, morality and aesthetics. Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness sets Africa against Europe, the deep inside of Africa
against the accessible outer parts, the river Congo against the
mythical forest; D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love contrasts the North
and the South, coldness and heat; William Faulkner in “The Bear”
opposes deforming history and the natural purity of the primeval
forest; Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises frames exhausted
civilization with the elementalness of nature.
This extension of space and the confrontation of places can
be seen in a larger context. According to George Steiner, Western
modern culture is confronted with a loss of spatial centrality, of “the
confident pivot of a classic geography” (63). This is accompanied by
the loss of the belief in the superiority of Western civilization as
developed in Europe and America. A sudden void of classic values
opens up, which had partly been filled by self-criticism, by the notion
that Western civilization was exhausted in its striving for rationality,
its arrogance, that it was full of hubris, was in fact an impostor, used
The Space-Time Continuum 359

means and disguises to exploit the other races and continents, and
needed the primeval as balance. The consequence is a geographical
decentralization of the idea of culture. Culture is multiplied,
serialized and “democratized” in its various manifestations. The
result for the novel is that it loses its spatial self-containedness and
its geographical, relatively homogeneous societal basis. Modern
authors like Hardy, Lawrence, Conrad, Hemingway, and Faulkner
gave expression to their dissatisfaction with society (as especially
Melville had done before) by extending space not only into nature in
terms of a new romanticism, but also into the unfamiliar. “[T]he
pivot of a classic geography” (Steiner) and its self-contained value
system, which include domesticated and ideologized nature as a pole
within the cultural and philosophic systems, are no longer sufficient
for the pursuit of the pressing epistemological and ethical questions
in fiction. Thus the concept of the quest is “geographized” on a wider
scale. Heroes are sent to the “primitive”, “mythic” regions of Egdon
Heath (Hardy), of Africa (Conrad, Hemingway), Mexico (D.H.
Lawrence, Bellow), or the Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi
(Faulkner). Nature is set against culture, not in Rousseau’s terms as a
friendly alternative and corrector of faulty civilizational develop-
ments, but as the quite “Other”, the basis of the mythical view, which
is now placed against history, just as the moment of vision is set
against the ordinariness of everyday life. Or, if one adheres to the
familiar geographical centers, then the spatial “stability” of the city is
at least partly dissipated by subjective, atmospheric sensibility
(Henry James, Joyce, Virginia Woolf) or made into a (demonic)
threat (Dreiser, Dos Passos). By showing the negative influence of
civilization on the individual and on society, the dominance of the
cultural over the natural frame is damaged, if not irreparably broken.
The next step, at the end of modernism, is nature’s also losing its role
as a retreat, compensation, or a balancing force (see Alcorn). With
the common loss of orientation, place, or even names of places may
finally be all that is left once the ideological positions have failed to
make sense. Frederic Henry, the protagonist in Hemingway’s A
Farewell to Arms, sees in place names alone the remaining truth in
words:
360 From Modernism to Postmodernism

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and
the expression in vain [...] I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that
were glorious had no glory. [...] There were many words that you could
not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity [...]
Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene
beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of
rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates (165).

6.3.2. Postmodern Fiction: Alternatives

As mentioned, according to Daniel Bell, the organization of


space has “become the primary aesthetic problem of mid-twentieth-
century culture, as the problem of time (in Bergson, Proust and
Joyce) was the primary aesthetic problem of the first decades of this
century” (107- 11).97 As Gadamer has pointed out, relativity today is
no longer experienced in terms of time but in terms of space, which
means that time is defused in a context of simultaneity. The
opposition between the known and the unknown, the near and the far
away, one’s own culture and other cultures appears to be cancelled,
steps into the background, or is not actualized. The result, however,
is not that the extended space coordinates the different social cultures
into a new integrated one, but that, conversely, space loses its
existential and its social anchoring. It abandons its function as social,
existential place. Anthony Giddens has called globalization “a
process of uneven development that fragments as it coordinates”
(175). Jameson notes that in this “new global space”, “our bodies are
bereft of spatial coordinates” (1992, 49). Though the “postmodern
hyperspace” (44) “has moved the closest to the surface of our
consciousness, as a coherent new type of space in its own right” (49);
it no longer has the “capacity for representation” (36). Being
unarticulated as place, lacking the ability to create relations of
familiarity or of ordinariness, this new space forms the basis of a
postmodern or “hysterical sublime” (29), in which, as Jameson says
in an interview, “it is the body [not the self, as in the modern
sublime] that is touching the limit, ‘volatized,’ in this experience of
images, to the point of being outside itself, of losing itself”
(Stephanson 5). This new experience of global space is marked by
the loss of human dominance over the spatial environment. Though
the latter is produced by humans, it turns into a field of overpowering
force all its own, and transcends “the capacities of the individual
human body [...] to organize its immediate surroundings per-
The Space-Time Continuum 361

ceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external


world” (Jameson 1992, 44). To call this experience sublime,
however, is problematic, given the diffusion this term has undergone.
There are by now a confusing number of sublimes underway. The
Jamesonian sublime, for instance, differs from Lyotard’s sublime by
the fact that the latter is enabling, which the former is not — and
both are quite different from the Kantian sublime.
For Jameson this new type of space that leads to physical and
mental disorientation symbolizes “the incapacity of our minds, at
least at present, to map the great global multi-national and decentered
communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as
individual subjects” (1992, 44). This also concerns art and
architecture. Yet even under the circumstances sketched out by
Jameson, views on the role of architecture and art in general may be
either optimistic or pessimistic. While David Harvey’s analysis of
the state of affairs in architectural urban space leaves little hope for
the fruitful combination of aesthetic and social goals, Jameson calls
for a reorientational “new political art” that “will have as its vocation
the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping” (54) and
will achieve “a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode
of representing this last [the world space of multinational capital]”
(54). Harvey notes, disapprovingly, another, not political but
aestheticizing, postmodern approach to this kind of unpossessed
abstracted space: “[T]he postmodernists see space as something
independent and autonomous, to be shaped according to aesthetic
aims and principles which have nothing necessarily to do with an
overarching social objective” (D. Harvey 66). What Harvey notes of
urban space is also true of postmodern narrated space, which
suspends social purposes, static configurations, and fixed patterns,
and, in Harvey’s words, emphasizes “fragmentation”, “the
ephemeral”, and “uncertainty” (296). In fact, this penchant for
deconstruction in postmodern art demonstrates — though with
certain reservations — the preference for aesthetics over ethics (see
Hoffmann and Hornung 1996).
Yet in spite of the abstraction of space, the sensory and
spatial aspects of the fictional world do not lose their importance.
They are only deployed differently. In terms of the situational duality
of form and force, they serve the expression of energy, not of form.
In Nietzsche’s physiological aesthetics, his aesthetics of force and
362 From Modernism to Postmodernism

form, “the body and physiology” are “the starting point” for thought
and art; indeed, it is “essential [...] to start from the body and employ
it as guide”. Artists themselves are “full of surplus energy, powerful
animals, sensual”, and all art exercises “the power of suggestion over
the muscles and senses, which in the artistic temperament are
originally active”(1968, 271, 289, 421, 427), and it breaks up the
subject’s established hierarchies. For Heidegger, following
Nietzsche, “the sensuous, the sense-semblant, is the very element of
art”, since “[a]ll being is in itself perspectival-perceptual, and that
means [...] ‘sensuous’” (1991, 73, 213). Interpreting Nietzsche,
Vattimo writes that form is “forever being exploded by a play of
forces, of particular forces, namely the body’s instincts, sensuality
and animal vitality” (1993, 105). Lyotard, pursuing the same train of
thought, speaks in favor of visual narrative and turns against the
common privileging of the linguistic over the sensory, the discursive
over the visible, because only the perceived particular guarantees
difference and plenitude. Seeing difference creates force, trans-
gresses the categories, deconstructs the system, and protects us from
the abstractions of wholeness and metaphysics (1971, 14-15); it
privileges the particular over the universal, the concrete over the
abstract, and the subconscious over the conscious.
Susan Sontag, together with Leslie Fiedler among the first to
pay critical attention to the emerging new art, turns against modernist
reductionist aesthetics and incites us to “recover our senses. We must
learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more”. With reference to
Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year at Marienbad, she emphasizes the
importance of “the pure, untranslatable, sensuous immediacy of some
of its images, and its rigorous if narrow solutions to certain problems
of cinematic form” (1961, 9). Indeed, “in place of a hermeneutics we
need an erotics of art” (14). Ihab Hassan, another of the early
theorists of postmodern art and culture, notes that in postmodernism,
“truth inheres in the visible” (1982, 108), in the surface view,
because surface representation provides (true) appearances and no
(false) depth views. John Barth advises the writer of prose fiction that
“its visual verbality, and its translation of all sense stimuli into signs,
are precisely the ones that we should pay the most attention to”
(Bellamy 1974, 4). William Gass says in an interview: “For me
fiction isn’t an alternative to anything [...] and it doesn’t strive for
universals. It merely makes particular things out of universals”
The Space-Time Continuum 363

(Bellamy 1974, 35), and in his novel The Tunnel Kohler notes:
“feeling is something you breathe” (412). It is remarkable that in all
these statements, in spite of the privileging of the sensuous and the
perceived particular, scarcely anything is said about the individual
subject who sees, hears, and feels, while much is made of the
liberation from constraints both social and intellectual.
Both modern and postmodern fiction argue for the visual and
the particular, yet there are decisive differences as to what the visual
and particular mean. Joyce and Hawkes can be seen as examples.
Behind the hermetic Joyce emerges quite a different Joyce: the
enemy of abstraction, the creator of numberless small sensory details
that make up the everyday life and function as the projection of our
souls. Hawkes notes: “My fiction is almost totally visual and the
language depends almost totally on image” (Bellamy 1974, 104).
Like Joyce, Hawkes has an “interest in exploiting the richness and
energy of the unconscious”, but he follows more Kafka’s example,
for he “believe[s] in coldness, detachment, ruthlessness” (Bellamy
1974, 104), attitudes he believes he needs for focusing his material
on the “theme”, on sensuality, sexuality, violence, and destruction.
The “unfamiliar or invented landscape helps me to achieve and
maintain this detachment” (Dembo and Pondrom 16), since it serves
as a matrix for simultaneity, supports the application of
multiperspective, makes all perspectives relative, and asserts the
paradoxical split nature of human existence and the comic disparity
of human dreams and drives. Postmodern narrative deconstructs the
modernist concepts of space, just as it decomposes the notions of
time, character, and plot, insofar as they promote the dimensions of
form and order in the narrated situation and its meaning. Don DeLillo
has rightly noted that in spite of the demand for “visual verbality”
(Barth) “[t]here isn’t a strong sense of place in much modern
writing”. Speaking in fact about the postmodern novel, he distances
himself from this tendency: “I do feel a need and drive to paint a
thick surface around my characters. I think all my novels have a
strong sense of place” (DeCurtis 62), an assertion which is only
partly accurate because he only emphasizes places and objects like
the supermarket and the TV, stressing rather what people do or not
do and thus confirming (mildly) the trend he describes.
Under the auspices of force, a flexibilization of space occurs,
which leads — as in other fields — to paradoxical arrangements.
364 From Modernism to Postmodernism

First, the dissolution of the seemingly indissoluble unity of subject


and object causes the separation of character and environment; they
become detached from one another and no longer form an
“objective” or “subjective” unity. Second, space itself splits into
space and place, place representing containment, circumscription,
milieu, and form, whereas space — indefinite, infinite, and fluid —
incorporates force. As always in postmodern fiction, the positions are
not fixed. Both space and place can become ambivalent in their
positions; their role in the meaning-scheme of the text can be played
with, even reversed. An example of this is Elkin’s The Dick Gibson
Show. The protagonist of the novel defines himself not by individual
place, as one would expect, but by homogenizing place into space,
sterilizing local surfaces, and denying geographical differences; he
sees himself as “Dick Gibson of Nowhere, of Thin Air and the
United States of America Sky” (21), “the generalized sound of
American life” (105). The social frame (character, role, action/event)
and the natural frame (space, time) of the situation need not but may
be manipulated independently of its unity.
In principle, the representation of space follows the designs
of montage: it is not ideologized as “setting”, “environment” or
“milieu” or made use of as initiator of, or reactor to, existential
feelings and thoughts. It becomes decentered and rejects the idea of
“reality”, recognizability, human plausibility, or logical consistency.
This means that space is not only free to be detailed or left vacant
(because the continuity of space and time never can break off), but it
is furthermore fantasized so that it can be free to be differentiated or
de-differentiated, to be localized or synthesized, or to build or disrupt
(together with time) the creative “natural” basis for new imaginary
worlds. In space, too, the possible and imaginary replace the stable
and allegedly given. Barth has written — like Henry James or
Lawrence Durrell before him — about the “Spirit of Place”. He
turns against the old idea of a realistic setting: “The very notion of
place, or ‘setting,’ realistically evoked as a main ingredient of fiction,
is no doubt as suspect at this hour of the art as are the conventions of
realistic characterization or linear plot as practiced by our literary
great-grandparents” (1984, 128). One should feel

free to come to new terms with both realism and antirealism, linearity and
nonlinearity, continuity and discontinuity. If the term ‘postmodern’
describes anything worthwhile, it describes this freedom, successfully
The Space-Time Continuum 365

exercised. [... T]he ‘postmodern’ writer may find that the realistic, even
tender evocation of place (for example) is quite to his purpose, a purpose
which may partake of the purposes of both his modernist fathers and his
pre-modern remoter ancestors without being quite the same as either’s
(1984, 129).

Barth’s references to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, to Borges, and to


Calvino’s Invisible Cities make clear that he thinks of a kind of
“irrealistic” (Barth echoing Borges) transformation of “realistic”
space and its world of objects. The spirit of free transformation, of
“irrealism” suspends and makes manipulable, or rather,
exchangeable, not only the categories of reality and fiction but also
those of sameness and difference, and thus transgresses the system of
categorization in general. Actuality and possibility take the place of
categories. Again in Barth’s words, “at one point the Khan [in
Calvino’s Invisible Cities] observes that perhaps all these invisible
cities are variations of Venice: that Marco Polo has never left home.
That is the sort of Landgeist which may still haunt and inspire us in
the closing decades of twentieth-century fiction” (1984, 129). In fact,
Calvino’s book shows nothing but transformation, metamorphosis,
and change; there are possible cities within or around the actual ones.
The only historically real one mentioned is Venice. Calvino writes in
Invisible Cities:

[D]ifferences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places
exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the
continents. [...] The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has
found its city, new cities will continue to be born (108-9).

For the presentation of space in the postmodern novel, three


factors are important that all converge in their deconstructive
tendency but do not necessarily combine in individual authors or
texts; in fact, they are in part mutually exclusive but together
demonstrate the higher flexibility, the reign of possibility, not
actuality, also in the approach to space. First, the appearance-
disappearance paradigm reigns in the presentation of space; second,
space is liberated from the concept of (determinate) milieu, from the
projection of the inner into the outer, and from elaborate description;
and, third, movement is transformed into a mere operation in space
and time: beginning, end and goal are lost or suspended.
366 From Modernism to Postmodernism

6.3.3. Appearance and Disappearance

The representation of place and space in postmodern fiction


can be understood in terms of what Virilio has called the replacement
of the “aesthetics of appearance” by the “aesthetics of
disappearance”. 98 The aesthetics of appearance asserts place-identity
and a sense of rootedness, creates spaces and times of individuation
and of social or universal connection, and establishes a coherent
perspective of continuation; it opposes spatial and social disaffection
and barrenness, the merely insignificant and superficial. Against the
fleeting, the ephemeral, and the fortuitous are set patterns of denial,
hope, meaning, and utopian perfection. The postmodern aesthetics of
disappearance denotes the vanishing of time and space as palpable
meaning-giving areas of social life. In this sense, it is a reaction to a
change in reality, or rather, in the sense of reality. It ultimately
cancels difference and depth, and it does away with the consolation
by place of which Hemingway speaks.
In Beckett’s Malone Dies there is no externality; there are no
roads, forests, bicycles or crutches as there are still in Molloy.
Malone only possesses a notebook, a pencil, and a hooked stick for
opening and closing the skull space of his room. Increasingly
foregrounded in Beckett’s trilogy are stasis, inertia, exhaustion, and
the labyrinth of (mental) repetition and confusion, all of which come
across as entropic by the loss of movement, that is, by the dynamics
of force. The Unnamable has no definable plot, no namable
character, no describable setting and no chronological time flow. The
forms of the book are repetition, contradiction, and question. The
book starts: “Where now? Who now? When now?” (Moll 293) In
Beckett’s “Imagination Dead Imagine”, the places vanish into space;
the narrating voice is bound to a vague rotunda and skull-like
enclosure.
Robbe-Grillet’s spatial universe contains, in Borges’s phrase,
a “fundamental vagueness” (Fic 19), “the indefinite light of a rainy
landscape” (Voy 4), the “labyrinth of streets” (Era 43), a “labyrinth
of unlighted hallways” (IL 97). In the first paragraph of In the
Labyrinth, the narrator notes, in a manner reminiscent of Beckett,
that outside it is both rainy and sunny, cold and hot, windy and calm.
A few pages later he describes an object on the table as a cross, a
knife, a flower, a human statuette; it could in fact be “anything” (72).
The Space-Time Continuum 367

The preface to Robbe-Grillet’s novel In the Labyrinth rejects all


depth associations, stating that the “reality in question is a strictly
material one; that is subject to no allegorical interpretation” (28).
Five writers who become influential for American
postmodernists, Kafka, Beckett, Borges, Robbe-Grillet, Nabokov,
write only surfaces, and even the surfaces may be suspended.
America is seen by Baudrillard as the best example of the
disappearance of social rootedness and density, the loss of the
authenticity of place; in his words (referring to Virilio): “the America
of desert speed”, of “social desertification”, is a model of “the
inhumanity of our ulterior, asocial, superficial world” (1988a, 5).
This superficiality brings about the dissolution of the regulating order
of the social world, of hierarchical distinction and of totalizing form,
of the distinction between nature and culture, surface and depth, the
outer and the inner, the true and the false, between negation and
affirmation, reality and fiction.
Also abandoned are the particulars of everyday life.
Vonnegut explicitly rejects the routine world of the quotidian, an
attitude that would be underwritten by most of his postmodern
colleagues: “I do not furnish transportation for my characters; I do
not move them from one room to another; I do not send them up the
stairs; they do not get dressed in the mornings; they do not put the
ignition key in the lock, and turn on the engine, and let it warm up
and look at all the gauges, and put the car in reverse, and back out,
and drive to the filling station, and ask the guy there about the
weather. You can fill a good-size book with this connective tissue”
(Bellamy 1974, 201). Federman writes that the “new fictitious
creature will be [...] unconcerned with the real world” (1975, 13).
Time and space are solely the objects of imagination and reflection.
Sukenick speaks of “a series of overwhelming social dislocations”
(DN 41).
These dislocations do not make place and things disappear,
but the natural framework of the situation is no longer intimately
bound up with the social level of the situation, with character and
action, with environment and milieu. The outer no longer functions
as the projection of the inner. In Snow White, there are no de-
scriptions of the place where Snow White and the dwarfs live, nor of
streets or cities, while many references to an American setting open
up a comic contrast between the archetypal milieu of the fairy tale
368 From Modernism to Postmodernism

and the civilizational circumstances of the present. Gass notes that


Omensetter’s Luck “really says nothing at all about the 1890s,
nothing about the Ohio river towns, of which I have no knowledge
whatever. Fiction, goddamn it, is fiction. When will that simple truth
be acknowledged? The same thing is true of most of the stories”
(LeClair and McCaffery 164).
The method of voiding space not only produces emptiness; it
also provides the opportunity to play with the absence-presence
constellation, a strategy which again, though in a different way,
serves to establish the force-aspect of the narrated situation. The
dimension of nothingness is created by leaving open in the
description of space “unnatural” and mysterious gaps of emptiness,
which, however, do not elude control. Control over emptiness is
retained by play, by blurring the borderlines, for instance between
representative and the textual levels, as in Sorrentino’s Mulligan
Stew. In this novel the spatial placement of people and occurrences
does not go beyond the indication of an unidentified house or
restaurant, a bar, a nightclub; yet when a place is specified it is
mystified. The handling of place is included in the book’s overall
strategy, which aims at a violation of logical continuity, a fusion of
ontological planes, of “somethingness” with “nothingness”. It
points at the opposition of seeming and being, and finally at an
overall uncertainty. Thus placement in space is both established and
dissolved. The cabin that Martin Halpin and Ned Beaumont inhabit is

a rather odd house, to say the least. There is the living room and the den,
but we have not been able to find any other rooms. It seems as if there are
other rooms, but when we approach them, they are — I don’t quite know
how to put this — they are simply not there! There is no kitchen, no porch,
no bedrooms, no bath. At the side of the living room, a staircase leads
“nowhere”. Oh, I don’t mean to say that it disappears into empty space, it
simply leads to a kind of ... haziness, in which one knows there is
supposed to be a hallway and bedroom doors: but there is absolutely
nothing. Neither Ned nor I dare to say what is uppermost in our minds,
that is, that if we walked into this haziness, we would walk somehow into
another dimension. (Ned thinks — wishful thinking! — that we might
walk into another book!) (MS 30)

This opposition of something and nothing on the referential


level can be both radicalized and attenuated by contrasting the
referential and the textual dimensions of narrative. When Halpin (to
whom already his “quiet life [...] was fantastic” [152]) walks to a
The Space-Time Continuum 369

nearby “town”, he has fantastic experiences that obfuscate the


boundaries between the ordinary and the extraordinary, between
presence and absence, seeming and being, but also between “reality”
and art. There “were trees in a kind of generic way, ‘typical’ trees.
They looked amazingly like drawings. The sun was above and
behind me and did not, throughout my walk, move. I cast no
shadow”. Looking back at the cabin they lived in, Halpin thinks:
“There it sat, certainly recognizable but curiously odd-angled,
strangely lopsided in effect, as if lacking first one dimension, then
another [...] Even more curious (I might even say chilling) was that
the upper story, viewed now from outside, was no more substantial
than the same story inside”. Then “I saw before me a town! Or let
me record that it was not quite a town. By this I mean that it was
rather bizarrely and unnervingly unfinished, with buildings here and
there composed of front walls and doors only, others having (like our
cabin) vague and unfinished stories, and streets that stopped short
and beyond which were vast expanses of mist and sky”. Pointing
from the fictional actuality of the text to that of another text, using
intertextuality as a constructive principle for heightening uncertainty
or rather multidimensionality, Sorrentino opposes (playfully)
referential and textual levels. Halpin finds out that “[t]he town, by
the way, was begun by an American novelist who abandoned it to
become a journalist;” it actually “existed in a typescript locked away
in a trunk in a Poughkeepsie attic” (MS 153-54); he felt assured that
his author Lamont would not find him there.

6.3.4. Significant Oppositions: Closure and Openness, Sameness


and Difference, The Inanimate and the Animate

Space is not just a place to be filled with things, houses,


people, traces of the past, expectations of the future; it is also the
basis for the creation of significant oppositions that determine as
oppositional matrices the whole narrative process and its meaning-
giving function. They are closure and openness, sameness and
difference, the inanimate and the animate. The most important form
of the closure-openness paradigm used in fiction is the prison-escape
or prison-rescue pattern (see Dickens, Hawthorne, Melville, Conrad).
It appears in postmodern fiction in various modes, which Gass’s The
Tunnel, Federman’s The Voice in the Closet, Barthelme’s Snow
370 From Modernism to Postmodernism

White, and in passing Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and Elkin’s Dick


Gibson Show may exemplify.
In Gass’s The Tunnel, time is the prison. Place gives time
presence as its substratum, makes time a subject, not only an object
and receptacle for developments and actions. It is a one-place novel,
in which things accumulate and store up time, making time’s
continuous presence a burden, even a threat. According to Professor
Kohler, the main character in the novel, history “is not a mighty
multitude of causes whose effects we suffer now in some imaginary
present; it is rather that the elements of every evanescent moment
endeavor to hitch a ride on something more permanent, living on in
what lives on” (315), i.e., living on “inside its surroundings — in
objects, [...] in my mother’s rings, my aunt’s nested boxes, my
father’s car — in the dregs of every day where my life composts
itself — rots, warms, blends, bursts into flame — [...] in uncapped
tubes of toothpaste, in rime on grass and leaves, in — in short —
things seemingly trivial, things set aside or overlooked, things
apparently passing which nevertheless abide in either themselves or
their duplicates” (314-15). Kohler is prisoner of the house, of the
past, of the constraints of life and knowledge that have become traps.
The familiarity of things in the house, their (quasi-independent) links
to the past, to the confining circumstances of his life, the
estrangement from his wife, press on his mind and cut him off from
the possibility of renewal, of expanding his consciousness:

Hard to get about the house, however, even if pacing is really needed, not
alone because of my books or her bureaus, but because of the memories I
have to skirt, the clutter of old arguments I have to step over, the bruised
air which can scarcely bear another blow, [...] odors of anger and
bitterness in curtains, in corners, tables I dare not touch for fear of the tears
turned to dust I’ll carry off on my fingers, every object in the house an
image through which my thoughts will unwillingly pass into an intolerable
past. [...] the house is an historical trap whose dangers drive me along an
increasingly narrower path (463-644).

Kohler digs a tunnel in the basement of his house — as a fantastic,


surreal and mental act of resistance — in order to escape “from the
camp” (148), from the felt absurdity of his existence. He leads a
double-coded life above in the house and below inside the earth, with
burdening time and liberating space. Space, in a typically paradoxical
manner, is both the preserver of the time passed in the house and the
The Space-Time Continuum 371

means of escaping from time and place into the undefined, elemental
space of the earth. Some remnants of the modernist identity and
alienation theme remain here visible, though they are transformed
into the fantastic mode. In fact, Kohler’s dilemma is a postmodern
version of the crisis of the modernist split self, expanded into a crisis
of the sense of reality, history, and knowledge, and symbolically
expressed in the vertical opposition between above-ground and
below-ground, between the site of human life above and the mystery
of the earth below, of form and force (the tunnel as symbol will be
dealt with below).
While in The Tunnel the mass of things and their suggestions
of time passed establish a trap, a trap can also be indicated ex
negativo by the absolute emptiness of space, the failure to mention of
place and things. This is Federman’s case. The vacuity of space and
the failure to mention time here paradoxically testify to the presence
of time, of the burden of the past, its existential dimension. Federman
shuns place, and in his novels the firm placedness of people changes
into a “condition of placelessness” (Lutwack 216). To Whom It May
Concern is narrated “without any mention of time and place”;
everything appears “on a timeless vacant stage without scenery. No
names of places. No decor. Nothing” (164). The reason lies in the
author’s traumatic experience as a child. The closet in The Voice in
the Closet is the place where his mother hid him as a boy to save him
from deportation by the Nazis, while the rest of his family was sent
to Auschwitz and was killed there. Indeed, “the closet moment” is his
“real birthdate”; it gave him an “excess of life” (Federman 1989, 64),
yet it remains unspeakable — quite in accordance with Wittgenstein
and Lacan’s views that feelings and especially such excruciating
feelings cannot be expressed in language. However, the closet is also
a kind of “phantasmic repository” (Kennedy 500), the driving
impulse for narration. It is both a place of closure and of opening. In
Federman’s case the displacing/replacing of the closet is the
hiding/revealing strategy of an existential pain that is unable to face
the past that is, however, unavoidably there and forms a trap. Only
storytelling can rescue the mind from closure. This paradoxical
method of “placing” by displacing, or displacing by placing falls in
step — and not accidentally — with the absence/presence,
narration/void figurations of postmodern storytelling in general.
372 From Modernism to Postmodernism

In Barthelme’s Snow White, the prison situation is different.


It is determined by the dialectic of imprisonment and rescue. Prisoner
and liberator are not the same person — the princess is the prisoner,
the prince the (failing) rescuer — a constellation that creates not only
a personal condition but also a pattern, the pattern of the fairy tale.
As so often in postmodern fiction, the establishment of the pattern
and the breaking of the pattern are the means of freeing narrative
energy. For the liberation of narrative force, Barthelme literalizes the
Snow White story but also changes almost every detail of Grimm’s
version, making it contemporary, placing it in the US, and combining
the legendary fairy tale with other tales, especially Grimm’s
“Rapunzel”. What for Snow White in Grimm’s fairy tale is a place of
refuge from the evil plans of the jealous queen, the house of the
Seven Dwarfs, is in Barthelme’s novel turned into a prison, not
literally a prison but a place signifying the prison-character of the
world, of the ego and the language. The term used for the state of
inertia, of boredom and paralysis in Snow White is the topical word
“alienation”, now embedded in a typically distorting, ironizing form
of metaphor with an unexpected, extravagant, and bizarre term of
comparison: “alienation seep[ed] in everywhere and cover[ed]
everything like a big gray electric blanket that doesn’t work, after
you have pushed the off-on to the ‘on’ position!” (131) Snow White
yearns for something new: “OH I wish there were some [new] words
in the world” (6). She writes a “dirty great poem four pages long”
(10), which disturbs everybody’s equilibrium.
Rescue must come from outside; self-escape is impossible.
Mental horizons are fixed by standard discourses that preclude the
view of alternative possibilities. One of the dwarfs poses the
questions: “TRYING to break out of this bag that we are in. What
gave us the idea that there was something better? How does the
concept, ‘something better,’ arise?” (179). The impeded force of the
imagination fails to think of an alternative — a condition docu-
mented in Snow White’s (and the others’) spiritless language, bound
as it is to the business and consumer world. Though she remarks,
“[m]y imagination is stirring [...] like the long-sleeping stock
certificate suddenly alive in its green safety-deposit box because of
new investor interest”, she has to admit to the dwarfs (answering
their question why she stays with them) that, “‘It must be laid, I
suppose, to a failure of the imagination. I have not been able to
The Space-Time Continuum 373

imagine anything better!’ I have not been able to imagine anything


better” (59).
Quite logically, Snow White looks for help from the outside.
But for that she has to change her role. She takes up the role of
Rapunzel, hanging her long black hair out of the window for a prince
to climb up and literally liberate her from her prison. The Rapunzel
motif serves to pinpoint the prison-escape motif in symbolic terms
and thus to focus the story. Snow White understands the mythic
significance of letting down her hair: “This motif [...] is a very
ancient one. [...] Now I recapitulate it, for the [...] refreshment of my
venereal life” (80). The role of the prince, here named Paul, is to
rescue from outside what cannot be liberated from inside, in fact to
manifest the romantic idea of a noble prince, which, however, turns
out to be just another self-imprisoning cliché nurtured by the
imagination. He follows the basic overall scheme of the book, the
shattering of expectations. While Snow White waits for the heroic
prince to save her, Paul turns into a comical anti-hero, unable to act.
He fails both as a prince and as the artist that he strives to be. After
he has seen Snow White Rapunzel-like hanging her black hair
suggestively out of the window, he says: “It has made me terribly
nervous, that hair. It was beautiful I admit it. [...] why some innocent
person might come along, and see it, and conceive it his duty to
climb up, and discern the reason it is being hung out of that window.
There is probably some girl attached to it, at the top, and with her
responsibilities of various sorts” (13-14).
Paul then runs away from his “responsibility”. Yet his
attempt to flee the mental prison that his role as fairy-tale prince
bestows on him is again ironized. His quest for escape becomes
another sample of failure, the failure to escape from his pre-assigned
role; Snow White’s failure to be rescued is thus paralleled by the
prince’s failure to escape the role of rescuer. Paul hides in a
monastery in Western Nevada, escapes the Order, “hides” in Spain,
gives lectures to the French, has another experience of defeat in the
post office in Rome, and returns to the monastery. Reflecting on the
motives of his behavior, he connects them, in a time-jump, to
contemporary, twentieth-century, social conditions, seeing the reason
for his behavior in the lack of opportunity for heroic action in our
time. When he finally decides to return and fulfill his princely role,
again pattern and fulfillment of the pattern stay far apart. He
374 From Modernism to Postmodernism

vacillates, meditates, and filters his reactions through the clichés of


literary and cultural conventions. Unable to act, he becomes a mere
voyeur, digs a bunker outside Snow White’s house, and installs an
observation system, which includes mirrors and dogs. He ironically
fulfills his princely role of finally rescuing her in quite a different
way from what was expected: by drinking the poisoned Vodka
Gibson intended for Snow White by the evil Jane. His last words are
pure, inadequate banality: “This drink is vaguely exciting, like a film
by Leopoldo Torre Nilsson” (174), and he dies with “green foam
coming out of his face” (175).
Imprisoned in traditional discourses and clichéd ideas, Snow
White rejects another wooer while waiting for the princely rescuer
Paul: “But this ‘love’ must not be, because of your blood. [...] I must
hold myself in reserve for a prince or prince figure, someone like
Paul. I know that Paul has not looked terribly good up to now and in
fact I despise him utterly. Yet he has the blood of kings and queens
and cardinals in his veins” (170). She realizes that the fault may not
lie in Paul alone but in our expectations of him: “Paul is a frog. He is
frog through and through [...] So. I am disappointed. Either I have
overestimated Paul, or I have overestimated history” (169). When
Snow White sadly decides to pull back in her black hair she
resignedly remarks: “No one has come to climb up. That says it all.
This time is the wrong time for me. [...] There is something wrong
with all those people standing there, gaping and gawking” (131-32).
The book concludes in an open-ended finale with another ironization
and trivialization of patterns, the happy ending of the fairy tale, and
the liberating gain of new experience and knowledge through
mobility and quest:

THE FAILURE OF SNOW WHITE’S ARSE


REVIRGINIZATION OF SNOW WHITE
APOTHEOSIS OF SNOW WHITE
SNOW WHITE RISES INTO THE SKY
THE HEROES DEPART IN SEARCH OF
A NEW PRINCIPLE
HEIGH-HO (181)

The final issue is the wrongness of the pattern, of the time, of


the place, of people and actions and of language, or, in other words,
the prison-likeness of the world, the ego and the tale (“we exist in
different universes of discourse”, 44), and the impossibility of escape
The Space-Time Continuum 375

or rescue because of the distressing lack of possibility, of “something


better” — all this, however, rendered in a playful, ironic, and comic
mode. Though the book does not proffer escape or rescue from an
unchangeable state of confusion, it does offer the character and the
narrator a choice of attitude. The choices are resignation, acceptance,
assent, or rebellion and the play with them. These attitudes are
treated in the book as (abstract) possibilities of response more or less
unrelated to specific characters and without an effect of change on
the character or the situation.
Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow provides another version of
the prison-escape motif, though it is here generalized into the
opposition closure/waste and openness/freedom. The central spatial
paradox in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is that people desire open-
ness and despise closure but in fact cannot bear openness and must
fill it with the “system” of rationalities, categorizations, hierarchies,
and power structures in order to save at least the illusion of
dominating the world, while in fact they drive it to entropy. The
quest for freedom, openness, for escape from waste and suppression
leads to paranoia, tires the quester after futile acts of resistance
against the System, results in a mental state of exhaustion and
passivity, and in the extreme case, as with Slothrop, in death (see
also Stencil in V., Oedipa in The Crying of Lot 49).
The protagonist in Elkin’s The Dick Gibson Show imagines
that he lives in “what I think and nothing else”. As a “voice” on a
radio (251), he has an “undeveloped [...] sense of place” (190),
though, or perhaps because, he “had crisscrossed the country, leaping
in and out of landscape, stitching my wild, erratic journey” (141).
For him it is “as if all place — all place — was ridiculous, a
comedown [...], the material world itself existing only as obstacle,
curiously unamiable” (170), as a prison. Yet this openness of space
that he thinks he dominates takes its revenge. It “hitches a ride” on
all the voices that finally stream back at him in his two-way show
and fill him up with fear and hallucinations, thus transforming his
mind into the prison of the self.
A somewhat different version of the closure - openness
dialectic is the sameness-difference opposition. As Pynchon
demonstrates in Gravity’s Rainbow, radical openness in time and
space is only a speculative possibility, not one that can be actualized.
The human being cannot bear to confront emptiness, chaos, which is
376 From Modernism to Postmodernism

included in openness. Even ungeneralized particularity of things and


places and difference as value (as force) may disturb the human
mind, since they question the human dominance over situations;
sameness then comes to the rescue as synthesizing form, as a version
of closure, and transforms and domesticates the openness of the land.
This is the case in Elkin’s The Franchiser, where the protagonist fills
America with the chains of hotels and fast-food services, so that it is
the same, always recognizable America all over the continent and the
traveler feels at home wherever he or she goes. This stream-lining of
differences of course does not work. Difference as counter-principle
asserts itself, and the void opens in the course of time in every
individual existence, though the attempt is always made to bring all
specific entities into line. Sameness can also be the target of
criticism. In Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew, the author Anthony Lamont
writes about his earlier novel Rayon Violet to a Professor Roche:
“You are right that Indianapolis and New York are interchangeable
in this novel, and that the names of streets, parks, restaurants, etc.,
are identical: I thought to use this technique to get across my feeling
that our world has become featureless” (22). Difference and
particularity give things, like people, a certain individuality and
independence; sameness heightens the feeling of control and
counteracts the fear of the void. Or so it seems, until sameness
dissolves individuality and starts to control the world as anonymous
civilizational space, as system with its own, anonymous laws.
Finally, the inanimate-animate dichotomy reflects the
closure-openness opposition. The reversal of the relationship of
dominance between the social and the natural frames of the situation,
i.e., the dominance of the inanimate that swallows up the animate,
signifies (mechanical) closure. In the system of signification,
inanimate things then proliferate and the difference between human
subjects and material objects becomes tenuous at best, if not
cancelled. In modernism, the nature novel from Hardy to Lawrence
and Woolf had opened up the borderlines between the animate and
the inanimate in order to mark the depth-dimension of life and the
unconscious. In the epiphanic experience of Mrs. Ramsay in Virginia
Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, the abandoning of the self to the sphere
of inanimate things and the finding of the self in it are the same thing
because there is a universal connection and harmony among
everything that exists: “It was odd, she thought, how if one was
The Space-Time Continuum 377

alone, one leant to things, inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers;


felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in
a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus [...] as for oneself”
(101). This intimate relation to things of nature is gone in
postmodern fiction; nature indeed has lost its function as a consoling
frame of reference; instead “thingness” takes over and blurs the
difference between the animate and the inanimate. In Gass’s “ The
Icicles” from In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other
Stories, Charley Fender, a real estate salesman, adopts from his
revered boss, Mr. Pearson, the “beautiful belief” that “properties
were like people” (150), and indeed that “property owns people”
(152); his life “vanished so completely [...] that he couldn’t tell the
story of his life” (61). Fender becomes as inanimate as the things
around him, finally identifying himself with the icicles at his house.
Gass says: “The central images I wanted to develop led to [...] the
idea of the icicles as a kind of property, then as part of real estate”
(LeClair and McCaffery 168). Barthelme in Snow White speaks of
the “trash phenomenon” that “may very well soon reach a point
where it’s 100 percent”, so “that we want to be on the leading edge
of” it, “the everted sphere of the future” (SW 97); Lois Gordon
rightly notes that objects define “Barthelme’s people” (67), though in
a playful spirit. Tony Tanner writes that Pynchon’s V. “is full of dead
landscapes of every kind — from the garbage heaps of the modern
world to the lunar barrenness of the actual present. On every side
there is evidence of the ‘assertion of the Inanimate’ [...] the
proliferation of inert things is another way of hastening the entropic
process. On all sides the environment is full of hints of exhaustion,
extinction, dehumanization”.Indeed, as Pynchon writes in V., “the
world started to run more and more afoul of the inanimate” (467).
Tanner sees in this the “acceleration of entropy”, which is “perhaps
the most inclusive theme of the book” (1971, 159; 158).

6.3.5. Liberation: Abstraction and Fantastication

The inanimate, however, does not only signify closure. It


becomes at least ambiguous if not liberating in its function when it
signifies disorder within bourgeois order. As a listing of inanimate
items, it introduces disorder and incongruity into the order of the
situation and its language. It may create a new openness by de-
378 From Modernism to Postmodernism

constructing the accustomed central perspective on space and the


order of the image and by fashioning a new form that focuses on
discrepancy, even chaos. Objects are released, set free from order,
reason, determination, though they still may be attached to a
character and reflect his or her (liberating) oddity, as in an early
postmodern text, Gaddis’s The Recognitions. This disorder is double-
coded. It reflects the disorder behind the façade of order in society
and the resistance of the individual against social hypocrisy. In this
book, Wyatt Gwyon, an artist who resents bourgeois order and the
faked, civilized surface-existence and who suffers from the
impossibility of creating great art in the corrupt society of
counterfeiters, of whom he becomes himself one, works in a room
that is full of

the litter which had gradually filled the undetermined room until it
belonged to him. Things were tacked on the walls there haphazard, an arm
in dissection from a woodcut in the Fabrica of Vesalius, and another
sixteenth-century illustration from the Surgery of Paré, a first-aid chart
called “the wounded man;” a photograph of an Italian cemetery flooded by
the Po; a calendar good for every day from 1753 to 2059; a print of a
drawing of the head of Christ by Melozzo da Forlí; a ground plan of the
Roman city of Leptis Magna; a mirror; and rolls of paper and canvases on
stretchers leaning in the corners (93).

The things that in Wyatt’s case are still contained within the
circumference of a specific room then become independent. They
turn into a mere list. The list of items in the following example from
Gass’s The Tunnel seems to concretize the contents of a shop, but it
has paradoxically the contrary effect of not specifying the place, but
rather isolating the articles in a merely serial formation that has its
only significant coherence in the memory of professor Kohler, or
rather, in the verbosity of language:

The Harding High Sweetmeet Shop was a far larger establishment than the
others. It sold phosphates and sodas, sported big cakes beneath glass
covers, boasted stools, malt mixers, spigots seltzer bubbled from like beer.
It had piles of packaged pretzels and potato chips, caramel corn and
Cracker Jack, molasses cookies and sesame wafers. But every shop,
however modest, offered milkballs, butterscotch, niggerbabies, gumdrops,
jawbreakers, horehound, hot hearts, jujubes, caramels cut in soft brown
cubes, strings of red licorice more tangled than yarn, taffy stale as the salt
water it was said to be make with, Life Savers resembling cylinders of
small change, silver shot in incipient spills, wafer sandwiches filled with
The Space-Time Continuum 379

vanilla, fruit slices and candied dates, root beer barrels, almonds enameled
like store-bought teeth, Tootsie Rolls, chunks of chocolate in random
hunks like turned-up peat, cookies covered with a crust of white frosting,
gingerbread, cupcakes, and fresh fruit pies the size of one’s palm, as well
as prominently placed boxes of candy bars wrapped in the marks of their
trade: Butterfingers, Baby Ruth, Snickers, Oh Henry!, Hershey, Bit o’
Honey, Clark, Mars, Milky Way, Powerhouse, Chiclets, and, for a time,
Forever Yours (570-71).

This goes on and on and at some point starts to turn into an abstract
series of unrelated words that in the process of enumeration lose the
concrete reference both to Kohler and the things referred to and
signify only the confusing unendingness of the particular and the
impossibility of subjecting single entities to perspectivizing vision
and to rationalizing and categorizing thought. Since the chain of
words/things remains undimensional in perception, since it is more
and more unconnected to thought and feeling, the words forfeit their
situational coherence. In the context of mere “wordiness”, “the edges
of distinctions fray”, “[c]oncepts are pulled apart”, “meaning
escapes” in the “[d]e-composition” (25) of subjective or objective
links that could establish order and coherence. The paradox lies in
the fact that a seeming abundance of concretization turns into
unrelatedness and “abstractness”. The loss of the situation caused by
the lack of “reasonable” selection, combination, and context-building
ends in the play with words, which indirectly suggests the non-
referentiality of language, the unbridgeable tension between word
and thing, form and force. This is one way to fantasize the world.
The disruptive potential of the list is radicalized, not only
when specific items are lined up in a row but also when a series of
parallel situations makes up the list. In the following example they
are situations of making love and generating offspring. They blur the
boundaries between the animate and the inanimate, the organic and
the inorganic and extend the possible into the fantastic, keeping,
however, the psychological convention — being madly in love —
ironically intact. In a parody of love, characterized by a spirit of utter
recklessness and playfulness, Barthelme in The Dead Father
repudiates the literary tradition of representing and evaluating love.
In the words of the Dead Father:

I fathered upon her in those nights the poker chip, the cash register, the
juice extractor, the kazoo, the rubber pretzel, the cuckoo clock, the key
380 From Modernism to Postmodernism

chain, the dime bank, the pantograph, the bubble pipe, the punching bag
both light and heavy, the inkblot, the nose drop, the midget Bible, the slot-
machine slug, and many other useful and humane cultural artifacts, as well
as some thousands of children of the ordinary sort. I fathered as well upon
her various institutions useful and humane such as the credit union, the
dog pound, and parapsychology. I fathered as well various realms and
territories all superior in terrain, climatology, laws and customs to this one.
I overdid it but I was madly, madly in love, that is all I can say in my own
defense. It was a very creative period but my darling, having mothered all
this abundance uncomplainingly and without reproach, at last died of it. In
my arms of course. Her last words were “enough is enough, Pappy” (DF
49).

The writers’ comments on their use of such lists vary. We


may repeat here some of the utterances that we mentioned in another
context because they throw a light on the various concepts behind
the common strategies. When Larry McCaffery asked Barthelme in
an interview about the function of his “lists, which rank with those of
William Gass and Stanley Elkin as the best around”, Barthelme
answered that “[l]itanies, incantations, have a certain richness per se.
They also provide stability in what is often a volatile environment,
something to tie to, like an almanac or a telephone book. And
discoveries — a list of meter maids in any given city will give you a
Glory Hercules” (LeClair and McCaffery 43). Gass comments on his
lists too, but in a different manner: “When I am playing with forms,
it is often simply to find a form for something odd like the garbage. I
love lists. They begin with no form at all ... often, anyway. A list of
names is very challenging. There is one right order and the problem
is to find it” (LeClair and McCaffery 166). One might add that these
lists not only develop into an order but, conversely, also into a force
of their own that disrupts “regular” (spatial and situational) order.
Barth speaks of “the absolute chaos and anarchy of indiscrimination
that threatens the novel, that threatens all lists, catalogs, anatomies
and the rest” (Ziegler and Bigsby 37). It is thus the struggle between
disorder/force and order/form that comes to a climax in the mere
listings of items. Or, to quote from Gaddis’s The Recognitions: “The
separate multiple consciousnesses of the [...] things in these Flemish
primitives, that is really the force and flaw in these paintings” (490).
In a way, the list is an illustration of what Dilthey called the
hermeneutic circle: the problematics of the relationship between the
particular and the general, the impossibility and the necessity to
abstract from the specific the nonspecific, the conceptual. The
The Space-Time Continuum 381

problem is now radicalized by the language-reality dichotomy. The


use of the list is part of “the aesthetics of disappearance”. It
abolishes concrete placement in space for fear of limiting the range
of the imagination by the experience of familiar stability. The
imagination then playfully fills the remaining gap in its own terms, in
the extreme case by mere lists. Barth says of his long novels that
“their mere persistence” is “an exorcism of nothingness, of the
vacuum that one fears might exist if one stops to look at the void”
(Ziegler and Bigsby 36).

6.3.6. Liberation: Movement, Closure, and Aimlessness

Movement and the absence of movement are important


indications of what the text is about. Movement tends towards
openness and defines itself against closure. Now the paradoxical case
is feasible: that movement results in closure by the endlessness of
repetition without aim and result. Kafka, Borges, Beckett, and
Robbe-Grillet fill their fictions with dreaming, obsession,
hallucination, and nightmare. Their texts are pervaded with
claustrophobic, prison-like or labyrinthine but indistinct, indefinable
places. The protagonists either are confined in such prison-like places
or wander through them in movements without end, which is more or
less the same thing. Two important aspects characterize movement:
way and goal. When only one of them is available, movement loses
its end-directed dynamics and becomes stagnant, mere repetition,
either a wandering around in a constant deferral of purpose and aim
or only hope/vision/intention for the future without means to realize
them. Kafka writes in his diary: “All is imaginary [...] the truth that
lies closest, however, is only this: that you are beating your head
against the wall of a windowless and doorless cell” (qtd. in Heller
108). He speaks about truth and the truth-seeking human being in
terms of the goal and the way to reach the goal: “There is a goal, but
no way; what we call the way is only wavering” (qtd. in Heller 108).
The land-surveyor in The Castle has a goal: to be accepted and settle
his affairs in the castle. But in spite of ever-new beginnings, his
nightmare-like efforts are constantly frustrated by the impenetrability
of offices and officers at the castle — the result being that he
wanders in the impenetrable labyrinth of paths in utter pain and
despair, becoming ever-more weary and wasted in his efforts. Unlike
382 From Modernism to Postmodernism

postmodern authors, Kafka does not yet appear to see the


unfathomability of the labyrinthine structure of space and of the mind
under the modality of the possible as a chance at creativity for the
mind. If he indeed does see it in this way, he then considers it a
burden, a burden that must be borne. Kafka’s imperial messenger is
imprisoned in movement that will never reach a goal, the way
extending into infinity. He “is still forcing his way through chambers
of the innermost palace”. However, “he will never get to the end of
them; and even if he did, he would be no better off”. Staircases
would be replaced by courtyards, the outer palace would turn into the
inner palace, new staircases, courtyards and palaces would follow,
“and so on for thousands of years” (Met 159). Kafka’s space is not
freedom but infinite imprisonment.
This changes decisively in postmodern fiction. Borges sets
the trends. As mentioned, in his fictions the labyrinth is the structural
paradigm that covers all movement; for him the labyrinth is “the
most obvious symbol of feeling puzzled and baffled” (67). He turns
space, time, characters, actions, or, to use his representative
examples, books, libraries, deserts, cities, palaces and lotteries, into
labyrinths; and he revels, in contrast to Kafka, in confounding
reversals and framings inside and outside the text. Borges figures
labyrinths within the text and the text itself as labyrinth. The
labyrinth is indeed the image/metaphor of the myriad of possibilities
that are offered at every point of the forked path, which is an “in-
complete, but not false image of the universe” (Lab 28). In the
labyrinth, sequentiality is complemented with or even replaced by the
simultaneity of possibilities; possibility becomes actuality and vice
versa; force relativizes form, form absorbs the dissolution of form. In
the “ideal” fiction, form and force are balanced; all possibilities are
chosen at once (as in the ideal novel of The Tralfamadorians in
Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.) One must note that, as Ts’ui Pên
in “The Garden of Forking Paths” maintains, “[i]n all fictional
works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he
chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts’ui Pên he
chooses — simultaneously — all of them” (Lab 26). His world is a
simultaneity of places, as it is also a simultaneity of times, and the
figuration of infinite designs.
The postmodern position becomes clear in a comparison with
Kerouac’s On the Road. This novel is a road novel and demonstrates
The Space-Time Continuum 383

how movement along the road, the traditional escape-route from


stasis and sameness in the American novel (cf. Huckleberry Finn),
reaches its limit because it has no finalities. In Kerouac’s book,
characters move on the road because “the last thing is what you can’t
get [...] Nobody can get to the last thing” (OR 48). Unlimited
movement on “an anywhere road for anybody” (237), “all the way
down the line” (59), with cities “breaking up in the air and dissolving
to [...] sight” (262), is the second-best thing if you can’t get the last
thing. The “adventures in the crazy American night” (96), with the
“unforeseen event lurking to surprise you” (128), the change of
place, time, perspective, and identity, in short, the experience of
indeterminacy, make for a beat life without teleology. Sal Paradise
says: “I had a book with me [...], but I preferred reading the
American landscape as we went along. Every bump, rise and stretch
in it mystified my longing” (99), as also did “the incredibly
complicated sweetness zigzagging every side” (115). In contrast to
this program of freedom by the road, postmodern texts no longer
allow fear of sameness and bureaucratic order to be compensated for
by spatial mobility, which is now satirized. In Ishmael Reed’s
Mumbo Jumbo the following polylogue occurs:
What is the American fetish about highways?
They want to get somewhere, LaBas offers.
Because something is after them, Black Herman adds.
But what is after them? They are after themselves. They call it
destiny. Progress. We call it Haints. Haints of their victims rising from the
soil of Africa, South America, Asia (154).

Postmodern narratives contain a lot of movement but,


following in the paths of Kafka, Borges, and Robbe-Grillet, do not
give attention to the spatial aspects of mobility, speed, the road, the
sequence of separate places, their appearance and disappearance in
the flight of motion, the bodily feeling of joy and exhilaration, or,
quite generally, the sensory perception and separation of things for
observation and emotional attunement: they do not indicate the form
movement takes. Movement is what we have called “abstract”.
What in Barth’s “Night-Sea Journey” the narrator/protagonist notes,
can be generalized: “The ‘purpose’ of the night-sea journey — but
not necessarily of the journeyer or of either Maker! — my friend
could describe only in abstractions: consummation, transfiguration,
union of contraries, transcension of categories” (LF 10). Federman,
384 From Modernism to Postmodernism

partly metaphorizing the journey, says: “My stories are usually based
on a journey of some sort. This doesn’t have to be a physical,
geographical journey from one place to another — I say ‘journey’
simply in terms of movement. And whenever there is movement in a
story, then there is also displacement, discovery, loss, and mystery”
(LeClair and McCaffery 129). Space, things, and movement,
unspecified by details, adopt a function of their own as mobility and
vacuity, as force. Sukenick writes, “though there is not necessarily
plot or story in a narrative, there is always a field of action, and in a
field of action the way energy moves should be the most obvious
element”. The field of action is marked by space and time. For
Sukenick the novel is “the most fluid and changing of literary forms,
space plus time equals movement: things in process of happening”
(1985, 12-13, 141, 9). In his Out, movement in space offers the
opportunity to concretize as force the abstract narrative principles of
composition and decomposition, integration and displacement, by the
interchange of meetings and departures.
The separability of goal and way in movement makes it
possible to distinguish between mobility and immobility within
movement: mobility as purposeful, goal-directed motion, immobility
as mere, circling repetition. Postmodern fiction exploits this contrast.
Mobility vs. immobility is one of its central figurations and relates to
the absence-presence paradigm. Mobility, for instance, makes
Pynchon’s V. a “fluid” book, but it ends in immobility. Stencil, the
protagonist of the book, attempts to make up for the feeling of
emptiness by the force of movement, but the quest fails to take the
form of directedness towards an end and a fixable goal; Lady V., the
goal of the quest, dissolves into a multiplicity of designations or even
into mere fiction, and finally into a mere collection of inanimate parts
of machinery. In Gravity’s Rainbow, all the movements are goal-
directed, the goal being the rocket as, ultimately, a pure source of
force. As such, it is beyond the grasp of human beings, since it
avoids the form of fixities and definites, multiplies its meaning, is the
symbol of openness that implodes closure, all of which renders its
goal-status vague, multiple, and indeterminate. This indeterminacy
also devalues the endeavors invested in the way to the goal, the
rocket, which is finally no goal but the sum of possibilities. In The
Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa’s active questing after the Tristero
underground system of communication is again a rejection of social
The Space-Time Continuum 385

form and a questing after the force of renewal, but this too ends in a
passive drifting through the mysteries of places, streets, directions,
while the goal in its vagueness remains beyond grasp.
But movement is not only aligned with the modernist
formula of the quest. Movement is tested for its value, for what it is
worth as action. In Gaddis’s JR, mobility and immobility are the two
sides of doing business, and doing business in this telephone novel
can be divided into the activity of the business people and the
movement of things. The activity of doing business is stagnant; it is
reduced to fantastic telephone activities. The telephone schemes of
speculation and manipulation are topped by the fantasized operations
of the protagonist, JR, who, as an eleven-year old boy, deceives the
whole business world of New York about his age and status, and
simply by telephone builds up an international concern. While
mobility is mere “just doing”, circling, it is immobility in every other
sense. Mobility is reserved for inanimate things; the flow of stocks at
Wall Street investment firms and of consumer goods at a school and
an apartment, accelerates beyond control. Just as mobility reifies to
stasis, overstuffing with things turns into vacuity of purpose and
meaning. What happens is empty, stultifying routine, formless form.
It defines the deteriorating condition of society, or rather, its fantastic
condition of immobility in mobility, which points to a loss of the
force of renewal, to entropy.
Psychological, social, and universal perspectives combine in
quite another business novel, Elkin’s The Franchiser, which
individualizes the problem of doing business, using as a basis the
mobility vs. immobility paradigm. Movement on the road is not in
The Franchiser the sign of individual freedom from social bondage,
as in the modernist novel (cf. the end of Dos Passos’s Manhattan
Transfer, Kerouac’s On the Road and Bellow’s Augie March). On
the contrary, it is the affirmation of sameness, of social normalcy; it
is the source and the result of healthy business activities, of the
projection into the exterior world of a pattern of mastery, mastery
attained by the interchangeability of identical franchises across the
landscape. For Ben Flesh, the protagonist of The Franchiser, who
lives from his “grand rounds” all over America, from his own circuit
of repetitive visits, reality fuses with fiction. Franchising is a kind of
costuming for a Broadway show; Ben feels “like a producer with
several shows running on Broadway at the same time. My businesses
386 From Modernism to Postmodernism

take me from place to place. My home is these United States” (34).


His business and his “need” while traveling across the United States
is to create with space and travel what Dick Gibson in The Dick
Gibson Show does with time and the radio: namely, to spread
American ordinariness all over the landscape, “to continue his
country, to give it its visual props, its mansard roofs and golden
arches and false belfries, all its ubiquitous, familiar neon signatures
and logos, all the things, all its crap, the true American graffiti, that
perfect queer calligraphy of American signature, what gave it its
meaning and made it fun” (270). The “meaning” of expansive
existence has here been turned inside out, providing a perfect
contrast to the movements in Kerouac’s On the Road. Satisfactions
do not evolve from the excitements of surprise, the changes of
identity, the expansiveness of life, the experience of its continuous
difference and force, as in On the Road, but from the transformation
of difference into sameness. In fact immobility is the aim of mobility.
The country is standardized and fictionalized, so that everyone can
move along without fear of the “real”, of the strange, and so that one
is nowhere alone in one’s travels, always meets the familiar, the
same Kentucky Fried Chickens or Howard Johnsons, the solidarity of
other Americans, the identical affirmative motto: “Take It Easy”.
One actually moves from nowhere to nowhere. Both goal and way
are devalued.
Throughout his travels Ben Flesh remains amorphous.
Movement and travel are only franchised movements and travels, a
mere circling; they have given him only a collective identity, a
borrowed life modeled according to clichés, free from passions,
complexity, and uncertainty. He “dolefully confesses” that “‘some
people, me, for example, are born without goals. There are a handful
of us without obsession [...] I live without obsession, without drive, a
personal insanity even, why, that’s terrible. The loneliest thing
imaginable. Yet I’ve had to live that way, live this, this — sane life,
deprived of all the warrants of personality. To team up with the
available. Living this franchised life under the logo of others!” (282)
But in the ecstatic vision before his death, he re-identifies with what
has been his life. This recourse to his own self is possible because,
like Dick Gibson, he lived for an American ideal, the communal
spirit, even if the way he wanted to promote it was false in its
negation of difference and complexity. The book gains its ironic
The Space-Time Continuum 387

angle and its complexity by splitting up truth into an “objective”


negative and a subjective, positive perspective.
In Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, social, psychological,
and aesthetic considerations combine in quite a different way. Yet
they rest once more on the juxtaposition of mobility and immobility,
as they do so often in American novels. Billy’s various stages of life
interchange mysteriously, uncontrollably. This is true of his
experiences as prisoner of war in Dresden during the firebombing in
World War II, his involvement with the world of the inhabitants of
the planet Tralfamadore during the time he was kidnapped, and his
current, ordinary existence as a middle-aged optometrist. These
phases of his existence interact, fuse, and lead to an obsessive habit
of “time travel”, movements in time and place that make the absent
present and the present absent, without a concrete motif or goal. All
mobility becomes resigned, goalless, and immobile by the repetition
(about a hundred times) of the “staticizing” phrase: “So it goes”. It
overforms the psychological problem of traumatic, uncontrolled
force with a formative, both generalizing and comicalizing, aesthetic
perspective. Time travel is in part motivated by the traumatic
experience in Dresden during the firebombing, but it is also
abstracted from a merely psychological view. Though time travel has
a beginning and an end, ending in Bill’s violent death, it has no
simple origin and goal. It cancels the rigid, regulating forms of
bourgeois existence, but it is not regenerative, remaining in a state of
both vacuity and confinement.
What we recognize in all these novels is that a character is
not the leading factor of the narrative, nor is a theme like identity and
wholeness, but instead, anthropologically basic, though abstract,
paradigms. The characters serve as point of transfer for basic
contrasting constellations that also gain symbolic function: mobility
vs. immobility, openness vs. closure, difference vs. sameness, the
inanimate vs. the animate, or simply doing vs. what is worth doing,
simplicity vs. complexity. We will return to these decisive problems
in the analysis of character in postmodern fiction.
388 From Modernism to Postmodernism

6.3.7. Spatial Symbolism

At this point we will follow up our discussion of the role of


the symbol in postmodern fiction that we began in the second chapter
because the symbolic figuration in these texts is indicative of the
concepts, strategies, and difficulties of meaning-building in these
texts and extends the insight into the problems raised by symbolic
forms in postmodern fiction. As has been mentioned, postmodern
fiction is in many ways both a continuation and a disruption of the
strategies of modernist narrative. It is a continuation because both the
modernists and the postmodernists believe in the necessity of form.
There is a difference between the modern and the postmodern
symbolic methods in that the latter is multiperspectual, does not
produce meaning as wholeness, but can only “possibilize” meaning,
which includes non-meaning and needs to incorporate chaos and
entropy, while the ingredient of chaos in modern fiction is only
superficially integrated in the totality of form. Furthermore, in
postmodern texts symbols of incongruity, of deformation, are not
perspectivized in a single negative way (like the symbols of the
grotesque, for instance, in Conrad, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, or Nathanael
West), but in a multi-judgmental way. This strategy superimposes,
for instance, the satiric and the grotesque modes of evaluation and
mutes their critical acumen by play, irony, and the comic mode. Two
statements may serve as an introduction. In Gass’s The Tunnel,
Kohler notes in his typically paradoxical style: “What I had
discovered [sifting through Auntie’s boxes in the attic] was that
every space contains more space than the space it contains”. Though
the remark refers to the piles of boxes within boxes, so that “out of
one box a million million more might multiply, confirming Zeno’s
view” (600), it suggests not only the infinite number of boxes, but
also, with the multiplication of vehicles, the endless multiplication of
tenors, of meanings, and of possible suggestions locked in objects;
indeed “history deposits itself inside its surroundings — in objects”
(314), so that the “mutual influence of simultaneous presences
[shows] in the same space” and reveals “the complex inter-
connections of life with Life” (425). Complementary to Gass’s
statement is Kenneth Burke’s reference to reader-response quoted
above: “One cannot long discuss imagery, without sliding into
symbolism [...] We shift from the image of an object to its
The Space-Time Continuum 389

symbolism as soon as we consider it, not in itself alone, but as a


function, a texture of relationships” (165).
We have seen in an earlier chapter that postmodern narrative
problematizes the meaning-building “crossovers” (Elkin) that are the
basis of modernist symbolic fiction. Robbe-Grillet, for instance, even
rejects symbolic figurations, and Barthes, writing about Robbe-
Grillet’s narrative method, says: “[t]he object is no longer a center of
correspondences, a welter of sensations and symbols; it is merely an
optical resistance. [...] here the object does not exist beyond its
phenomenon” (1972, 14-15). This of course is only true in relative
terms, because, as Burke notes in the quote above, “[w]e shift from
the image of an object to its symbolism as soon as we consider it”.
In spite of certain reservations with regard to the modernist symbolist
fashion, the postmodern writers often make use of symbolism in
practice, not as totalizing form but as a partializing and sometimes
deconstructing form, using characters, but especially places and
things, for the purpose of signification. Borges says that the
(decentered) labyrinth is “the decisive most obvious symbol of
feeling puzzled and baffled” (317). Elkin remarks: “I’m conscious of
symbols and patterns in my work” (LeClair and McCaffery 108).
Though Gass’s Kohler speaks in The Tunnel of signs of wear in the
symbolic method, indeed, says that “the centers of our symbols wear
like stairs” (Tun 25). Gass himself holds a more complex view. He
says in an interview: “I keep fussing around, trying to find ways to
symbolize what I want” (LeClair and McCaffery 162); in his story
“Mrs. Mean”, the maxim “signs without are only symbols of the
world within” (HHC 133) leads the narrator “to mark her [Mrs.
Mean’s] and her doings in my head” in a way that “is far too
abstract” (HHC 106). Barthelme ridicules and parodies the modernist
symbolizing method. He addresses the reader with the questions
“Have you understood up to now that Moinos dead or alive is only a
symbolic figure?” and “Is it clear that the journey is a metaphor for
something else?” (ToL). However, as the statements of almost all
postmodern writers demonstrate, the text needs a form, both for the
“spatial” representation of the simultaneity of positions and
perspectives, and for the indication of the irrational and the ineffable.
Thus Barthelme confirms the symbolist method ex negativo.
What evolves from the remarks of the postmodern writers is
a double notion: symbols are needed but they have to be transformed.
390 From Modernism to Postmodernism

The vehicle and tenor of the symbol must be reconstructed or newly


fashioned, mostly without the fixed center of significance, which is
replaced with a tenor full of manifold suggestiveness. As Roland
Barthes writes, “the plural of a text” is kept intact when “everything
signifies ceaselessly and several times, but without being delegated
to a great final ensemble, to an ultimate structure” (1974, 11-12).
What is created in all these cases is a constructionist, “metaphorical”
symbol that holds together vehicle and tenor in an artificial manner,
full of tension, often with incompatible terms, in the sense defined
above. It stands in contrast to the “natural” symbol, the synecdochal
symbol, where part stands for the whole, or the metonymic symbol,
characterized by contiguity resting on human systems of dif-
ferentiation (dryness-wetness). The postmodern writers may be
skeptical of “meaning” in any traditional sense, but the more com-
plex their narratives become, the less they can do without a
symbolizing spatial master grid or a central thing or image. They
need it as a concrete matrix towards which to direct their play with
relations and disruptions, attitudes, and evaluations, in the process of
continuously inventing and revising meaning.
Apart from the synecdochal, metonymic, or metaphorical
structuring of the symbol, the relationship between the vehicle and
semantic tenor can be causal, analogical99 or arbitrary and
contingent in the way it signifies, analogical here used in a
simplifying way for both substantial similarity and similarity of
structure. Causal links generally belong to the synecdoche, which
sets the part for the whole; analogical links set the outer and the inner
in a relationship of parallelism and thus elucidate the emotional and
the spiritual through the sensual. Analogical bonds refer more to the
self, its inner situation and its relation to other people and to the
world, and thus become symbols of self-understanding, while the
causal symbol becomes a milieu-symbol that makes known a
segment of ideas and forces that define and press on the character(s)
and determine its (their) lifeworld. All three — causal, analogical,
and arbitrary links — stand for the refusal to accept the
incomprehensible, but, while the causal and analogical structures
express the need to avoid contradiction and confusion and establish
(rational) frames of reference, the arbitrary tenor simply serves the
need for creative, imaginary control, without claims to truth, or at
least not to a rationalizable single truth. If analogy — and less so
The Space-Time Continuum 391

causality — seemingly take stock of and list that which is


ungraspable, they still categorize the latter as the ineffable and thus
establish the (comforting or disturbing, even terrifying, but meaning-
ful) dualism of the known and the unknown. The postmodern,
aestheticized, arbitrary symbol foregoes that consolation or
constraint, depending on the viewpoint. With its imposed tenor, it
does not rely simply on analogical or causal links, but also fosters the
complication and ironization of the relation between vehicle and
tenor, emphasizing its incongruity. The purpose of this strategy is to
stimulate the imagination, which takes stock of the potential of
possibilities of meaning by superimposing one structure on another,
without much thought given to the pressing concerns of “reality”.
In transitory texts of violence, the symbol is still reminiscent
of the modernist thematic symbol, for instance, the symbol of the
grotesque, though it already bears more constructionist traits. In
Jerzy Kosinski’s brutal war novel, The Painted Bird, the title-image
of the painted bird (rejected and killed by the other birds for being
different) gains the status of a central symbol for the actions of
perversion, torture, and killing that dominate the individual episodes.
In Heller’s Catch 22, “the soldier in white”, who “was constructed
entirely of gauze, plaster and thermometer” is already a symbol with
a widening tenor. It is a symbol of violence and the grotesque. It
suggests the danger to life and individuality everywhere in this
world, even in the hospital. In his inability to act and think, the
soldier in white stands for everything that is hollow on the inside, for
the hollowed-out and reified human being, for the “nauseating truth”
(C22 172) that “[t]here’s no one inside” (374) in the gauze and
plaster, and, one would have to add, that there is no meaning in
society, nor in action and reflection, and no coordination of them.
By widening the tenor of the symbol in postmodern fiction,
the symbol is no longer a form of wholeness and “essence”, but of
the simultaneity of perspectives. The meaning-giving process is
twofold in a paradoxical way. Significance is freely imposed on the
material, but the material vehicle is also searched for and deciphered
for its own meaning, and for the possibilities of meaning. Gass says,
“when it comes to the fashioning of my own work now, I am aiming
at a Rilkean kind of celebrational object, thing, Dinge”. “I am
exposing a symbolic center. When I think the exposure is complete, I
am finished with the story. [...] The title [...] is a direct statement of
392 From Modernism to Postmodernism

the central image” (LeClair and McCaffery 154, 168). Federman,


freely exchanging the terms metaphor and symbol, notes: “I still have
to find the image, the metaphor which will sustain the novel. That
too is crucial to my writing, or to much of so-called postmodern
fiction: it relies strongly on a central metaphor. [...] My role, once I
have set up the metaphor, is to decipher the meaning of that
metaphor and write its symbolic meaning. That will be the novel”.
Then he gives a concrete example: “Obviously the central image in
The Voice in the Closet [...] comes from a real, a very visual image or
snapshot — the image of the boy in that closet crouching to take a
shit on a newspaper” (LeClair and McCaffery 129-30). In fact, “The
Voice in the Closet is the deciphering of that picture and its symbolic
implications. Obviously the closet becomes a womb and a tomb —
the beginning of my life, but also its end — metaphorically
speaking” (LeClair and McCaffery 144). (When the Nazis came to
get his parents and his sisters, his mother pushed him into a closet,
where he stayed for 24 hours. Thus his life was saved, while his
whole family was killed in Auschwitz.)
The long postmodern novels especially demonstrate that
Federman is right about the “crucial role” of a central (spatial)
symbol for the construction of the narrative. We will here
concentrate on such central symbolic figurations. Examples include
Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon, Gass’s The
Tunnel, and Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy, in which the Rocket, the “West
Line”, the Tunnel, and the Giant Computer respectively serve this
purpose; we will add Hawkes’s Blood Oranges that uses a “sex
tableau” on the beach as a symbol of the symmetry of sex and
erotics, erotics and aesthetics, and aesthetics and nature, and
Barthelme’s stories “The Balloon” and “The Glass Mountain”, which
problematize the central ephemeral symbols named in the title,
together with the whole symbolizing process. Both the long and short
narratives use the spatial object to inscribe in it the idea that
“[e]verything is both simultaneous and continuous and intermittent
and mixed” (Tun 31). In two cases, the “West Line” and the Tunnel,
the spatial symbols are primordial images that inscribe the human
will into the shape of the earth; in the other two cases, the Rocket and
the Computer, they are images of machines that mark the self-
confident and self-dependent ingenuity of the human mind, its
innovative (deconstructive and reconstructive) force that aims at
The Space-Time Continuum 393

surpassing and dominating the force of nature. In all four instances


the spatial symbols signify the attempt to overcome boundaries and
extend limits; their vehicles are chosen for their all-encompassing
connotations and suggestiveness that open up the concrete design to
a wide-ranging but at the same time ambivalent, even diffused
meaning. Their tenors organize this meaning in terms of multi-
valence, possibility, and uncertainty. Reaching out in the process of
signifying to the greatest amount of possibility and ambivalence, the
texts appear to aim at “viewing things whole” (MD 411), but in a
new kind of wholeness, the attempt at inclusiveness or at an extreme
multiplicity of perspectives. Their plurality, mere possibility, and
contradictoriness explode the possibility of multiplicity in oneness.
What characterizes all these symbolic inventions is the tension
between the clearly circumscribed vehicle and the diffuse, multi-
plying tenor, the reason being that, again paradoxically, or perhaps
logically, the postmodern novel tends in its negation of meaning
towards the highest degree of universal meaning-testing. In the
following section, short analyses of Mason & Dixon, The Tunnel, and
Giles Goat-Boy may demonstrate this tendency that adopts but in fact
radicalizes and explodes the modernist thematic symbol of the kind
that Virginia Woolf uses in To the Lighthouse (see also the
examination of the structure of Gravity’s Rainbow at the end of the
book).100

6.3.7.1. William Gass, The Tunnel

The tunnel is for Professor Kohler the “escape route of my


own contriving” (498), escape from “disappointments”,
“resentments”, “letdowns”, and “failures”, from “betrayal, guilt”,
“jealousy”, and “humiliation” (54), from the feeling of “loss, grief,
loneliness”, from the weight of “tons of trivia and tedium” (29).
Having finished a book on Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany
and laboring on “its impossible introduction” (155) that he cannot
finish because he is fascinated with endings rather than beginnings,
he realizes that his book’s “soberly documented form”, “its powerful
logic”, “its lofty hierarchy of explanations”, the “tables of statistics”,
and the “disciplined academic style” are not adequate to what he
writes about: history. The question is: “how much life is simply
consecutive?” Kohler’s idea of release and re-orientation (“my
394 From Modernism to Postmodernism

subject’s far too serious for scholarship” 107) concentrates on his


“search for a symbol, some sense for my silly situation” (123), in fact
the force to open the “soberly documented form”. He finds this force
not in the house, for “[i]n this house I am afraid of everything” (17),
but rather in the hole in the earth below the house, the tunnel, which
he digs himself and which for him becomes an adequate signifier for
an alternative, forceful life and writing: “Today I began to dig; took
my first bite of the earth; put in my first pick. Astonishing. That I
have actually begun. Hard to believe. A beginning. With that first
blow — what elation I felt! Feel. I am light. I float although there is
no wind. I swoop low to gather altitude the way the roller coaster
does, and there I see the thick world differently. Engineless and
silent, I float under everything as easily as an image in the water. At
last — at long last — I’ve felt fistfuls in my fists. [...] I shall split the
earth asunder” (146-47). The cellar becomes a “wrathcellar”, a place
of elemental force. Kohler believes that

there must be an underworld under this world, a concealment of history


beneath my exposition of it, a gesture which will symbolize my
desperation. O my father! country! house of Kohler! hole up here! cling to
the furnacy end of this hollow rope, relinquish the air for the earth. A
plague on the front door may one day read: Herein lies a pointless passage
put down by a Pretender to the Throne of Darkness. Let God uproot this
pathway if He likes, we shall still stare at the hole the hole has left, and
wonder at the works of Man, and marvel at the little bit that mostly Is, and
at the awkward lot that mostly Aint (153).

Looking “for a reason why I’m here which will not be the
reason why I’m here” (148), Kohler (supposedly unknown to his
estranged wife) appears to dig a hole, a tunnel, in the cellar, in unison
with the hole and tunnel that will mark his new text about Germany.
Both merge. The hole in the cellar “will celebrate defeat, not victory”
(154); the tunnel that is “my quarrel with the earth” (182) is a “hole
as hid as my hidden text [...] the private inventions on these pages
from their tunnel into Time [...] runaway tunnel into HYPERBOLIX
ESCAPE SPACE” (498). The tunnel is Kohler’s “highest heaven of
invention”, combining the material and the spiritual, the concrete and
the abstract: “I do curl by curl carve my way through the closeness of
this clay, I do chip by chip chunk it out” (501). It is his way of
creating a spatial (earth) symbol for the simultaneity of force and
form, of being set free of the inexorable succession of time, for the
The Space-Time Continuum 395

hidden, the unknown, and the ineffable that rest in the earth and that
can only be opened up by the imagination. Thus the digging of the
tunnel and the inventing activity of the imagination merge. Kohler
wonders whether “the underground” can

tell us what goes on in that inner realm, however it happens, whether it’s
as we think, ever so slowly, and life sleeps upside down there like bats, or
whether, at the genetic center of the self, in pure birth earth, there is no
need for any action and all is over and nothing’s begun: because we’re in
that fabled place where compacts of conclusion coalesce like veins of coal,
compressed past the thought of further futures and consequently beyond
each form of the past, to be free of time like the proverbial bird, fixed —
frozen sufficiently for it, fired, glazed — that’s what we really don’t know
and maybe motivates my burrowing — if there’s a bottom nature, and just
what’s what where the well ends, when we pass beneath its water, when
we actually enter ‘in’ and find ourselves in front of n and of the other side
of i (501).

In spite of “the tedium of my task” and the “lack of loving


companionship”, “I know how hallowed the hidden is, how
necessary it is for us to occupy a world of our own contriving”,
which is accomplished in “off-the-cuff planning and makeshift
shafts”; indeed, “making do, cobbling, skimmering, fudging,
somehow getting on, is nearly the whole idea”. The hidden is the
symbol of “my own imaginary world [that] has been under
construction for a lifetime” (502). This imaginary world reinterprets
the world “in dream terms, revising Martha, my work, this house,
class time, my moments of self-abuse, as situations, scenes, and
players, because I lived in a double context” (503), namely in
“reality” and the world of dreaming, of the imagination, facing the
fact that “ordinary life is supported by lies, made endurable through
self-deception”; yet — “in my illusion no illusions are allowed”
(503). In fact, I “have, as the sillies sort of say, turned in, turned out,
dropped off, gone quite away into the peaceful silence of my page,
the slow cold work of my cellar” (411). Yet every thesis, Beckett-
like, calls for its counter-thesis; something is nothing and vice versa:
“With my tunnel I have committed the ultimate inactive act. After
all, what is a useless hole? I can honestly say I have accomplished
Nothing” (468) — except that “[e]very day I draw something down
in the dirt” (506), which explains the prevalence in the book of words
like “shit”, “penis/cock”, “fuck”, or “cunt”, the abundance of which
tries the reader’s patience.
396 From Modernism to Postmodernism

This brings us to the ultimate aspect of the tunnel: the


blending of tunnel and book. The tunnel becomes a symbol for the
creative process and again a symbol for the final product. In an
interview of 1976, Gass commented on the plan of the book, parts of
which have appeared in print since 1969; though the book was
published in its entirety only in 1995, this delay was more or less
according to plan. It is helpful to quote the whole passage from the
interview because it demonstrates the formal energy that went into
the book, the comprehensiveness of the design that delayed its
completion, and perhaps the inevitable failure of the book to attain a
multiplicity in unity, which the tunnel as symbol stands for and
finally fails to represent:

The book is a tunnel; the writing of the book is the digging of the tunnel.
So it has to have characteristics of tunnels which somebody might be
digging, out of a prison or concentration camp, say. Don’t you feel
surrounded by camp guards? [...] My character starts to dig a tunnel in his
own basement. Maybe he is not digging a tunnel, maybe he is just talking
about it, wishing it very hard, dreaming it, imagining very vividly. They’ll
all do. I’ve got to have it every way. But he is digging a tunnel in his own
basement, so he has to hide the dirt. If the book is itself a verbal tunnel,
then it is the depository: he dumps the language of the day in this place. So
instead of being a book in the ordinary sense, it is a dump ground, a place,
a location. The text is both a path through time and a pile of debris [...] A
tunnel is a hole surrounded by earth. This tunnel is going to be a hole
surrounded by the words that the narrator puts there. There are two ways
of making a tunnel: one is to hollow out a hole and take everything away,
and the other is to use earth to mold a tube. A tunnel is an escape route, a
way of crossing over things by going under. In my narrator’s so-called
referential life he is taking dirt out, but in terms of the construction of the
book he is bringing it in and molding it. He is building two kinds of
tunnel, then, one from the outside and one from the inside. In the verbal
tunnel the reader is on the inside. My problem is again to find the symbols
that will give the reader the analogy for the shape of the book (LeClair and
McCaffery 170-71).

What Gass seeks is a totalizing symbol or a string of symbols that


signify order and chaos at the same time. This problem is obviously
unsolvable, and it remains unsolved in the final version of the book.
The case of The Tunnel is a model case of the attempt to transform
the modernist, meaning-giving, thematic symbol into what Barth
calls the emblem of storytelling that contains all aspects of the text,
The Space-Time Continuum 397

in Gass’s terms, “a set of very open possibilities”, while rejecting any


“rigid design” (LeClair and McCaffery 171).
To complete the picture, we might add a few remarks about
some of Gass’s shorter texts. From the beginning, Gass creates
characters who find in symbols truth or ersatz satisfaction for the
failure to relate meaningfully to the world. He always uses the
metaphoric, the constructionist symbol, for instance in the two stories
“The Icicles” and “The Order of Insects” from In the Heart of the
Heart of the Country and Other Stories, where the symbolizing
process, as it were, carries on and transforms the modern symbol of
existential illumination into one of existential confusion. The
symbolic vehicles in these stories, icicles and insects, would under
“normal” circumstances appear pathetically unsuited to their tenors,
beauty, and universal order. The tension between vehicle and tenor
points to an estranged consciousness, a sense of personal frustration
and obsession, the wish to evade the world of deprivation, but also to
the state of the world itself, the unsatisfactory exclusiveness of
human, clichéd, dualistic categories of thought, in contrast to the
manifoldness of possible perspectives on the world. The female
protagonist in “Order of Insects” imposes the form of wholeness on
the symbolic vehicle of death and ugliness, by reversing the familiar
negative associations these creatures raise, thus imposing a feeling
and an idea on the uninviting lower strata of nature. In this process
the tenor is widely diffused, in fact goes out of control. The attempt
at control by creating meaning goes to the point of losing or giving
up control to the force of the uncontrollable relation between outside
and inside. The female narrator of “Order of Insects” perceives in the
ugly insects “gracious order, wholeness, and divinity” (HHC 188);
she is finally overwhelmed by what she perceives and imagines: “I
no longer own my own imagination [...] and then the drama of their
[the bugs’] passage would take hold of me [...] I felt, while I lay
shell-like in our bed, turned inside out, driving my mind away, it was
the same as the dark soul of the world itself — and it was this
beautiful and terrifying feeling that took possession of me finally,
stiffened me like a rod beside my husband, played caesar to my
dreams” (HHC 186). The symbol from nature, as it were, is “doubly”
aestheticized. The aesthetic figuration superimposes one kind of
aesthetic symbolic structure on the other. “The metaphorical”
(aesthetic-constructionist) structure of wholeness and order arrived at
398 From Modernism to Postmodernism

in moments of revelation willfully changes and expands the normal


synecdochal one that would, in viewing the repulsive bugs, signify
ugliness. Though the symbol is a means of adapting the world to the
experiencing subject, what happens here is the reverse case; it is the
adapting of the subject to the world, to the uncontrollable and
ineffable, as is also the case in The Tunnel.
If in Gass the symbolic method focuses not on space but
directly on a character, it is just like the spatial symbol: no longer a
substance in its own right but a kind of mirror, here a mirror for other
people who make of it a metaphorical, constructionist symbol. In
Omensetter’s Luck, according to Gass, Omensetter’s “unreflective,
prelapsarian presence” is a quasi-undefined material to be used by
other people for the needs and purposes of their own symbolic
disposition, and this presence “assumes fearful symbolic
dimensions”. He “strikes various people in town as a sort of reflector,
precisely receptive to symbolizing because he appears not to do so.
So each character in the novel is busy turning Omensetter into a kind
of material for the symbols they wish to make” (Ziegler and Bigsby
153-54). The relation between vehicle and tenor here turns arbitrary
and contingent. Indeed, “this unreflective, natural, threatening
character is a symbol for the concrete moment when all reflection
breaks down, when those who reflect on different levels of
consciousness can no longer communicate. Does Omensetter
represent the opacity of the relation between reality and the
imagination?” (Ziegler and Bigsby 153). We will come back to
Omensetter’s Luck later.

6.3.7.2. Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon

In Pynchon’s novel Mason & Dixon, the symbolic matrix is


the Westline that the two “Astronomers Royal” named in the title,
establish as “the Boundaries between the American Provinces of
Pennsylvania and Maryland, [...] using the most modern means
available, in marking these out, — one of them being a Parallel of
Latitude, five degrees, an Hundred Leagues of Wilderness, East to
West” (182). They take “Latitudes and Longitudes, by the Stars”
(201), and mark “a Meridian line, then clear a Visto, then measure
straight up the middle of it” (694). This Line is not only the
geographical grid and the historical anchor of the crucial part of the
The Space-Time Continuum 399

book, it also points to the future as the “object of hope that Miracles
might yet occur, that God might yet return to Human Affairs” (353);
this line is, in fact, the vehicle of all the different, contradictory
interpretations of the American way of moving Westward and its
universal significance, of the antagonism between civilization and
wilderness, the known and the unknown, dogmatic linearity and
magic circularity, “Modern Science” and “Ancient Savagery” (650),
in short, between form and force. Indeed, “[t]he Path of this Line”
(459), as “it speeds its way like a Coach upon the Coaching-Road of
Desire, where we create continually before us the Road we must
journey upon” (459), is both defensive and aggressive, a symbol of
the progress of civilization and its invasion into regions that belong
to others, to the Indians and to nature. The Line is the way “on West-
ward, wherever ’tis not yet mapp’d, nor written down, nor ever, by
the majority of Mankind, seen”. It “makes itself felt, — thro’ some
Energy unknown” (650). It is “a journey onward, [...] — an Act of
Earth, irrevocable as taking Flight” (531). Driving West, the
surveyors “trespass, each day ever more deeply, into a world of less
restraint in ev’rything, — no law, no convergence upon any idea of
how life is to be”, towards “some concentration of Fate, — some
final condition of Abandonment” (608-09). The Line is “some
Energy unknown”, but also the form of order and law, and of vio-
lence on nature and people: “Nothing will produce Bad History more
directly nor brutally, than drawing a Line, in particular a Right Line,
the very Shape of Contempt, through the midst of a People” (615).
Again the paradox reigns, and the symbol functions as
vehicle and as receptor of simultaneity and possibility. The
“inscription upon the Earth of these enormously long straight Lines”
(547) forges the “Way into the Continent, changing all from
subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that
serve the ends of Governments, — winning away from the realm of
the Sacred, its Borderlands one by one, and assuming them unto the
bare mortal World that is our home, and our Despair” (345). The
Line is home and produces despair. Being radically ambiguous in its
purpose and effect, it acts against the “Prairie of desperate
Immensity” (361), but is “also fear’d and resented” (440); it is
“link’d to the stars, to that inhuman Precision” (440), yet is also mere
routine and “a conduit of Evil” (701). Pushing the Line West gives
the Surveyors “fugitive moment[s] of Peace” (476): the sense that
400 From Modernism to Postmodernism

they have “pass’d permanently into Dream” (477), that they “traverse
an Eden, unbearably fair in the Dawn” (476), but it raises also
doubts, the “darker Sentiments” (479) about their mission, indeed,
“the great Ghost of the woods has been whispering to them, — tho’
Reason suggests the Wind, — ‘No ... no more ... no further’” (634).
Dixon says: “We shouldn’t be runnin’ this Line?” (478), the line
“with its star-dictated indifference to the true inner shape, or a
Dragon, of the Land” (601). The Line is a matter of human
responsibility; it is a form of culture, and it is not a form of culture.
Its creation is more a matter of elemental flux, yet it is also reigned in
by civilizational form, which does satisfy and does not satisfy desire,
the desire for the “ever unreachable point”, the pure combination of
form and force. In spite of human responsibility for the Line and the
personal engagements of the surveyors, the Line has its own will,
“has a Will to proceed Westward” (678). Mason and Dixon are only
“Bystanders. Background. Stage-Managers of that perilous Flux, —
little more” (545). The “true Drama” of the Line “belongs to others”
(619). “[T]he Visto soon is lin’d with Inns and Shops, Stables,
Games of Skill, Theatrickals, Pleasure-Gardens ... a Promenade, —
nay, Mall, — eighty Miles long. At twilight you could mount to a
Platform, and watch the lamps coming on, watch the Visto tapering,
in perfect Projection, to its ever-unreachable Point. Pure Latitude and
Longitude” (701-02).
As an alternative to Aaron and Dixon’s actual return to
England, the narrator envisions a state of affairs, in which they,
“detach’d at last, begin consciously to move west. The under-lying
Condition of their Lives is quickly establish’d as the Need to keep, as
others a permanent address, a perfect Latitude, — no fix’d place,
rather a fix’d Motion, — Westering. Whenever they do stop moving,
like certain Stars in Chinese Astrology, they lose their Invisibility,
and revert to the indignity of being observ’d and available again for
earthly purposes” (707). After encountering “towns from elsewhere,
coming their way, with entirely different Histories, — Cathedrals,
Spanish Musick in the Streets, Chinese Acrobats and Russian
Mysticks [...] they discover additionally that ’tis it [the Line], now
transporting them” (708), instead of their directing the Line. By
playfully reversing the roles of subject and object, the attribution of
responsibility wavers and is indefinitely balanced among possibility,
necessity, freedom, and randomness. At the end of their American
The Space-Time Continuum 401

adventure, the two surveyors “neither feel [...] British enough


anymore, nor quite American, for either Side of the Ocean. They are
content to reside like Ferrymen or Bridge-keepers, ever in a Ubiquity
of Flow, before a ceaseless Spectacle of Transition” (713).

6.3.7.3. John Barth, Giles Goat-Boy

From the beginning Barth has used spatial symbols for the
involvement in, and detachment from, time. His first two books, The
Floating Opera and The End of the Road, have a spatial symbol as
title: the first representing the medley but also the duration of life, the
second marking the end of comprehensibility and rationalizability of
values, probably with reference to Wittgenstein’s conviction that
“ethics cannot be put into words” because “values are consigned to
silence”, to the realm of the “mystical” (1961, 145). Just as Barth
works with a “baroque” and “flabbergasting” plot in The Sot-Weed
Factor and Giles Goat-Boy, the author also works in the latter book
with a “baroque” and “flabbergasting” symbolic setting: a complex
spatial form. In the “gigantistic” (Harris 150) novel, Barth creates a
gigantistic symbol, a computer, as a central locale and a crucial
frame of literal and figurative reference. In fact, there are two
computers. The whole fictional world is divided into an East and a
West Campus, each dominated by a computer, EASCAC and
WESCAC, which combine into a vast symbolic configuration. The
novel makes university and computer into symbols of the absolute, of
the universal (thus also parodying the modern concept of absolute
and totalizing form), and of the historical conflict between the East
and the West. The computer of the West Campus, WESCAC, which
dominates the Campus and all who teach and study there, is
indefinite in form and function, though not in power. It is the
accounting and control center of the campus. It has the ability to
program itself, and by its own logic WESCAC is able to kill, or to
“eat” people, “EAT” being “Electroencephalic Amplification and
Transmission”, by which people suffer a “‘mental burn-out’ [...] like
overloaded fuses” (GGB 53). The fantastic mode transforms the
signifying vehicle, the vast computer, into a spatial labyrinth;
concomitantly, it expands its tenor to embrace a potentially endless
number of significations by using as links between the two the
notions of causality, analogy, and seriality.
402 From Modernism to Postmodernism

The computer is both object and subject. It has the character


of a thing, is a controlling power, yet it seems to possess human
reproductive power: though Giles does not know who his father is,
he thinks it is the omnipotent WESCAC, a conclusion which,
however, is again put in doubt. The semantic tenor of the symbol is
thus as wide-reaching and vague as the attributes of its vehicle. The
computer is suggestive of the father’s archetypal struggle with the
son who wants to supplant him, and God as the father of the mythic
journey, and the struggle of the “high” and the “low”. It points to
the role of a metaphysical authority, both God and Satan’s; it is the
place where the existential moment of lovemaking takes place, and it
connotes the idea of the womb. One aspect contradicts and
complements the other indefinitely. In this way the computer forms a
renewed kind of constructed totality, not in the actuality of a fictional
world, but in the endless potentiality of references and ambiguities
embedded in a central, universal symbol that makes one think of
Kafka’s The Castle. Using the notions of both analogy and causality
as links between vehicle and tenor, the computer in Giles Goat-Boy
(and LETTERS) becomes the all-inclusive symbol for the production
of patterns and mysteries, also patterns of narration, a symbol for
senseless repetition and reduction, and also for the mystery of energy
and effectiveness (the idea is suggested — though not confirmed —
that the computer WESCAC is actually the author of the book; the
ironic equation of computer and author then returns in LETTERS).
Both vehicle and tenor are paradoxically both gigantistically
expanded and “eaten up”, as it were, by the windings, the
digressions, hesitations, convolutions of the plot. The overextension
of the symbolic significance of university and computer parallels the
overextension of the heroic Giles’s role, which is constructed
according to mythological (Campbell, Raglan) and literary models
(Oedipus Rex, The Divine Comedy), and reaches from the animal
world and its instinctual life to the world of religion and religious
salvation so that the “call to adventure” that Giles receives is
followed on both the physical and the spiritual-religious levels,
which the computer parodically integrates. The computer is the
central place for the opposition of, on the one hand, archetypal
patterns of life, of initiation, growth, leadership, love, and, on the
other, ideological fixities and workings of the machine, but again, as
in The Tunnel, or Mason & Dixon. Both the archetypical and the
The Space-Time Continuum 403

ideological are conceived as (contrary) forces: forces that strive for


control in order to master chaos and forces that work against control,
trying to save the vigor of spontaneous experience and of life against
generalization and civilizational order. Barth notes that the
components of the pattern of the “wandering hero” and of the quest
“can be interpreted symbolically with wide latitude, as they are in
those various isomorphs: the same model Jung sees as a paradigm of
the psychoanalytical experience, somebody else sees as the attempt
to account for natural phenomena — Max Müller’s old solar thesis
and so forth. Others sees it as a paradigm for the mystic quest; others
as a paradigm for every man’s and woman’s progress through the
rites of passage”. Barth attempts to draw on all these proposed
associations and even comes up with another isomorph: “the
wandering hero [in “The Night- Sea Journey”] reenacts the history of
a spermatozoon form the moment of ejaculation through the
fertilization of the egg” (Ziegler and Bigsby 28).
As mentioned, Barth turns into symbolic figurations not only
the narrated situation but also the creative process of writing fiction
itself. He employs the given lack of relations against itself in order to
create new imaginative relations and to gain “new work”. For Barth,
the symbol is an as-if symbol, and the notions of causality and
analogy that structure the symbol are as-if links. Commenting on
Borges’s short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, Barth writes: “In
short, it’s a paradigm of or metaphor for itself; not just the form of
the story but the fact of the story is symbolic; the medium is [...] the
message” (1984, 71).101 This statement presupposes two things: (1)
Since narrative can only signify on the basis of concrete situations,
“meaning” is made up by building worlds. The “empty center of
content”, i.e., nothingness, has to be replaced by something else, by
what Barth calls the “method of metonymy” (Ch 203), i.e. — in
Jameson’s words — “describing its context and the contours of its
absence, listing the things that border around it” (1972, 122-23). That
is where character, plot, the “filling” details of the narrated situation
come in. Taking up the traditional method of metonymy in
“realistic” fiction, which symbolize an exhausted worldview and
narrative strategy, Barth doubles the perspective and parodies the
traditional patterns of character, plot, time, space, i.e., the regulating
aspects of the traditional rendering of a story. (2) The other method
that Barth mentions is the “Principle of Metaphoric Means” (Ch
404 From Modernism to Postmodernism

212). It is in fact the truly symbolic method, the method of “saying


what the content is like” (Jameson 1972, 122). But, as we have seen,
this mode reaches much further than embedding signification in
specific things or in situations. It renders the narrative process, as it
were, self-reflexively symbolic of itself by making every situation
transparent for its constructiveness and the constructedness of every
artifact. As nobody else, with perhaps the exception of Pynchon,
Barth excels in the combination and fusion of “metonymic” and
“metaphoric” methods. By doing so he represents the force of the
artefact in its form.
The title story of the collection Lost in the Funhouse is
exemplary of how narrative and meta-reflection can work together in
eliciting the highest symbolic potential of the artefact. Here the
notion of analogy is expanded to its utmost limit so that narrative
itself becomes both a synecdochal and metaphorical symbol of itself,
synecdochal as narration, metaphorical as metafiction, or rather, as
metareflection. The whole story is made into a symbol of storytelling
and of all kinds of complexity in fiction and life, of the fact that
everything points to everything else. The narrated story, the trip of
the Mensch family to Ocean City, and the visit to the funhouse of
Ambrose, his brother Peter, and Magda G — are used to turn
“aspects of fiction into dramatically relevant emblems of the theme,
the theme being the problem of story-telling”. Imagination and
reflection work together on various levels to make the funhouse, the
story of the funhouse, and the storytelling itself into symbols of the
artifice. The text of the story is compared to the funhouse and the
funhouse to a large machine, a machine “incredibly complex yet
utterly controlled from a great central switchboard like the console of
a pipe organ. [... A] cunning [...] multifarious vastness” (LF 93). The
narratological problems turn the reflection of the narrator(s) towards
plot, action, character, theme, sensory details, ending, etc., with
direct or indirect intertextual references, for example, to Dos Passos,
Joyce’s Ulysses, or Beckett. By tripling the narratological perspective
(the story, reflection on the story, the historical development of
narrative methods), the author, as it were, gives a “history” of
narrative and its forms. Ambrose’s adventures and reflections in the
mirror-room, and in the treacherous passages and in what is called
the maze are correlated in the story with the telling of this
experience, which is confusingly done both in terms of actuality and
The Space-Time Continuum 405

possibility. The versions of the tale on the metalevel of the narrator’s


reflections cause the same confusion that Ambrose experiences in the
story by missing “the right exit” and by getting lost. In fact, both
Ambrose and the narrator get lost and speculate about the
prerequisites of perception, reflection and imagining, and about the
identity-theme. Ambrose is a character who “took a wrong turn,
strayed into the pass wherein he lingers yet” (LF 91), and wherein he
becomes a storyteller. The narrator, on the other hand, is a storyteller
who took a wrong turn and becomes a character in his despair about
the lack of progress in the story. Ambrose and the narrator mirror
each other both as character and as storyteller, without respect for the
boundaries between story and discourse, or between narrated and
narrator. Thus, a sequence of aesthetic positions is established that
relativize and ironize one kind of narrative stage by the other,
confirming emphatically, however, the fundamental human impulse
and the need to tell stories — the labyrinth being the central symbol
of all these significations. We will devote a special section to the
labyrinth as form and symbol. Barth himself reasons that “by
continually rubbing the audience’s nose in the artificial aspect of
what you’re doing, you’re really deliberately confusing the issue you
are pretending to clarify, transcending the artifice by insisting on it”
(Prince 54).

6.3.7.4. William Gaddis, JR

Our next example, Gaddis’s JR, demonstrates how space in


New York can turn into symbolizing place and how the spatial
symbol can be made into a playing-ground for sense-negating
perspectives, not only by expansion but also by concentration. The
96th street flat of the writer Schramm, who commits suicide, is the
quintessential place of the force of chaos, which is here not
invigorating but is one way that leads to entropy (the other is
stultifying form, see Pynchon’s story “Entropy). But as a symbol of
entropy, it is again a form of simultaneity: simultaneity of the aspects
of decay, of the decomposition of private life, of business and society
and of the arts. The place is counterproductive for the artists Gibbs
and Bast because, as Gibbs says, “[p]roblem Bast there’s too God
damned much leakage around here, can’t compose anything with all
this energy spilling you’ve got entropy going everywhere. Radio
406 From Modernism to Postmodernism

leaking under there hot water pouring out so God damned much
entropy going on think you can hold all these notes together know
what it sounds like? Bast?” (287) All the manuscripts in the
apartment — Bast’s music notes, Gibb and Eigen’s writings — are in
states of decay, representing the state of the arts in society. The flat
itself is a place of confusion, of the depreciation of order. It is full of
trash and waste. Under the “stuff piled up”, “things are really
screwed up” (555). The domain of sound is also wasted and trashed.
The radio is finally so deeply buried that it cannot be switched off;
the faucet cannot be turned off because Bast has broken off the
handle. The flat exemplifies the postmodern tendency to symbolize
by fantasticating the narrated situations, by incongruencies open to
all kinds of perspectivization. All the mail for the fictive Grynszpan,
a person invented by Gibbs and Eigen, gathers here. When the flat
becomes the “uptown office” for the JR business group for which
Bast acts as a representative, the signs of decay multiply with the
overflow of mail, the multitude of objects sent, and the “stuff piled
up”. The apartment expands/concentrates into a fantasized, spatial
center that actually could not possibly hold what it is supposed to
contain. There is a radical discrepancy between its alleged function
as center of communication for an international group of concerns,
and its small size, its state of decay, its overflow of things, its use as
private living quarters and its function as a retreat for the creation of
music and literature. Referring to communicative entropy, Gibbs
speaks of the “whole God damned problem listen whole God damned
problem read Wiener on communication, more complicated the
message more God damned chance for errors” (403).102 Since the
comic, satirical, and grotesque views all build on a basis of
incongruity, and since the more fantastic these discrepancies turn out,
the more flexible the perspective can become, the radical
fantastication of the place allows one to see entropy and its symbol in
a variety of perspectives — and also in a comic spirit. The girl Rhoda
comments on the situation from such an angle: “Because like watch
that sink in there man [...] I mean if that happens again we might
both wake up drowned and nobody would ever know it okay?” (576)
Literary references are also used: the place “is like Kafka’s” (578).
However, it is Kafka’s place extended to a greater freedom of (the
comic) perspective to a wider play with simultaneity.
The Space-Time Continuum 407

6.3.7.5. John Hawkes, The Blood Oranges

In John Hawkes’s The Blood Oranges, the phenomena of


nature are aestheticized by adding a “second”, artificial layer of
meaning that does not have its reference-point in a depth-dimension
of a concrete, symbolic entity, nor in the mere subjectivity of the
experiencing subject, but rather in the surface arrangement of beauty,
harmony, and order as such. Hawke’s purpose is to attain a
configuration of balance and symmetry: a design. The artful
composition of bodies at the beach overcomes the tension between
body and erotics in terms of aesthetics. Perception is here combined
with vision and reflection. In the novel, Cyril sees everything with
his very aesthetic memory of “the many years of my sexually
aesthetic union with Fiona” (BO 55-56). Two symbolic reference-
systems are thus imposed upon one another. The sexual, erotic
relation is, as it were, naturally pre-established, and men and women
in their singular or multiple relationships have only to complete the
relation aesthetically to make it successful. The two couples, Cyril
and Fiona, and Hugh and Catherine, lie at the beach at sunset “with
legs outstreched, soles of our feet touching or nearly touching, a
four-pointed human starfish resting together in the last livid light of
the day” (BO 37). Cyril rejoices at the beauty of the human body,
“the inertia, suspension, tranquility” (BO 37) that it expresses in the
warm, glowing sunlight. To “complete” the picture, Cyril bares
Fiona’s breasts and hopes that Hugh will do the same with Catherine,
so that “this momentary idyll” does not remain “incomplete,
unbalanced” (BO 42): “Could he [Hugh] [...] fail to appreciate simple
harmonious arrangements of flesh, shadow, voice, hair, which were
as much the result of Fiona’s artistry as of mine. But perhaps I had
been wrong. Perhaps Hugh had no eye for the sex-tableau” (BO 43).
Catherine then bares her breasts herself, and this completes the
symbolic tableau, its “balance of nudity” (BO 44), the symmetry of
sex and erotics, erotics and aesthetics, aesthetics and nature. Cyril
relishes the optic harmony and asks himself: “How long would we
manage to preserve this balance of nudity?” (BO 44)
As always, balance, symmetry, and completeness are
illusions, the stuff of which dreams are made. They are transferred
into nature in order to be finally broken up by reflection. Nature
serves as a neutral medium with which imagination can work,
408 From Modernism to Postmodernism

experiment, and play. The following example from the same book,
again a symbolic nature tableau, demonstrates how this double
transfer of meaning, the fusion of “grace and chaos, control and
helplessness”, first into nature and then back into one’s own situation
can acquire an ironic and finally a comic tone, can become
incongruous by the incompatibility of vehicle and tenor. The
incongruity rouses reflection and serves as the basis of irony and the
comic mode, both of which relativize or break up the syntheses:

There on a low wall of small black stones that resembled the dark
fossilized hearts of long-dead bulls with white hides and golden horns,
there on the wall and silhouetted against the blue sky and black sea were
two enormous game birds locked in love. They were a mass of dark blue
feathers and silver claws, in the breeze they swayed together like some
flying shield worthy of inclusion in the erotic dreams of the most
discriminating of all sex-aestheticians. Together we were two incongruous
pairs frozen in one feeling, I astride the old bike and hardly breathing, the
larger bird atop the smaller bird and already beginning to grow regal, and
all the details of that perfect frieze came home to me. Exposed on the bare
rock, lightly blown by the breeze, the smaller bird lay with her head to one
side and eyes turning white, as if nesting, while above her the big bird
clung with gently pillowed claws to the slight shoulders and kept himself
aloft, in motion, kept himself from becoming a dead weight on the smooth
back of the smaller bird by flying, by spreading his wings and beating
them slowly and turning his entire shape into a great slowly hovering blue
shield beneath which his sudden act of love was undeniable. Grace and
chaos, control and helplessness, mastery and collapse — it was all there, as
if the wind was having its way with the rocks. [...] Obviously the two birds
mating on the horizon were for me a sign, an emblem, a mysterious
medallion, a good omen. They augured well for the time I had spent with
Catherine and for my own future in the electrified field of Love’s art (BO
14-15).

This is a telling example of how a synecdochally conceived


symbol of nature can be transferred into a metaphorical
constructionist one, and then evaluated again in synecdochal terms, a
process which falsifies the metaphorical construction. Perception and
reflection unite to make a natural situation-tableau into an “emblem”
of the fusion of human opposites. But the incongruity between
perception and interpretation stimulates a second process of
reflection that, with self-irony, evaluates awareness as an illusion and
ends in (comicalized) doubt as to whether the aesthetic and the
natural fuse for more than a moment in view of the forces of chaos
and death:
The Space-Time Continuum 409

But as I pedaled once more between the funeral cypresses and approached
the villa, I found myself wondering if in the brief twining of that dark blue
feathery pair I had actually witnessed Catherine’s dead husband and my
own wife clasping each to each the sweet mutual dream which only
months before had been denied them by the brief gust of catastrophe that
had swept among us. Yes, Hugh and Fiona in the shape of birds and
finding each other, so to speak, in final stationary flight. Could it have
been? I smiled to realize that the pleasure and truth of the vision were
worth pondering (BO 15-16).

The final step in this symbolizing and de-symbolizing


process, which demonstrates the need of symbolic thinking and its
inevitable failure, is the playful acceptance of both symbolic thought
and the defeat of its meaning: the vision, mentioned in the quote
above, was “worth pondering”. Play unites the incongruous in
symbolic thought and again dissolves the synthesis in a double-poled
movement of to and fro. Hawkes says in an interview that Cyril “is
trying to talk about paradox, or the existence of that which does not
exist” (Bellamy 1974, 99), but Hawkes asserts that Cyril is also “a
comic character” (100). The author is trying “to deal with the
components, the parts, the inadequate fragments of human nature”
(102), but also with “the power, beauty, fulfillment, the possibility
that is evident in any actual scene we exist in” (107); the power, or
the force, however, does not “exist unless you bring it into being”
(107), i.e., see and articulate it symbolically. The counter-symbol in
the book to this symbol of possibility, “of freedom from constriction,
constraint, death” (112) is “the medieval atrocity” (112), the chastity
belt discovered in the depth of a ruined building, which in Hawkes’s
words “is a central image in The Blood Oranges. It is central to
everything I’ve written. That is, my fiction is generally an evocation
of the nightmare or terroristic universe in which sexuality is
destroyed by law, by dictum, by human perversity, by contraption”
(Bellamy 1974, 112).
In Hawkes as in Pynchon or Barth, the symbol is infinitely
rich in connotations, and the tenor wavers between openness and
closure, revelation and falsification of meaning with a gap in-
between that provides space for the ineffable. The result of this
strategy of openness is that the symbolic method also fulfills the
preconditions of situationalism. As Joseph W. Slade says about
Pynchon, “[s]ymbols are lightning rods for spiritual energy [...] For
410 From Modernism to Postmodernism

all its ambiguity, the ability to metaphorize and symbolize is the


most powerful weapon in the human psychological arsenal, and
Pynchon’s faith in its efficiency brings him down firmly on the side
not of Freud but of his rival, Carl Jung” (1983, 184). We will now
turn to Barthelme’s pictorial stories “The Balloon” and “The Glass
Mountain”. These texts are further examples of how symbolical
meaning and anti-symbolic deconstruction can work playfully with
and against one another.

6.3.7.6. Donald Barthelme: “The Glass Mountain” and “The


Balloon”

Of all postmodern writers, Barthelme uses spatial symbols in


the most playful sense, with an extreme “pre-meditated distance”.
Both of his pictorial stories, “The Glass Mountain” and “The
Balloon”, are “symbolic” stories, even though they are symbolic in a
transformed and reduced, in fact comicalizing sense. “The Balloon”
is a fantastic version of a “symbolic” story; it first establishes a
vehicle, the balloon, and then makes the story into a search for the
multivalent tenor. “The Glass Mountain” is a more complex,
fundamentally more reflexive story; it is in fact a symbolic-anti-
symbolic story, working in paradoxical terms, both confirming and
doubting the meaningfulness of the symbolic method for postmodern
times. It is actually a reflection in narrative terms about both the
necessary existence and the necessary dissolution of the traditional
symbol, or rather, of its hidden properties and spiritual tenor.
The glass mountain, about which “[e]veryone in the city
knows” (CL 59), and which “towers over that part of Eight Avenue
like some splendid, immense office building”, vanishing “into the
clouds, or on cloudless days, into the sun” (CL 60) is again a symbol
with a wide-reaching tenor that stands for, and in fact contracts and
superimposes, a simultaneity of times, of actualities, and of
meanings. While ascending the glass mountain, the climber reflects
about the reasons that one would climb such a mountain, an
adventure which many “knights” have failed to complete
successfully and have paid for with their lives. He finally finds the
reason for his climbing-adventure in the fact that the glass mountain,
or rather, “the castle of pure gold” at the top of it, is “a beautiful
The Space-Time Continuum 411

enchanted symbol” (CL 61). Yet the reason for climbing up to the
“enchanted symbol” is split:

58. Does one climb a glass mountain, at considerable personal


discomfort, simply to disenchant a symbol?
59. Do today’s stronger egos still need symbols?
60. I decided that the answer to these questions was “yes”.
61. Otherwise what was I doing there, 206 feet above the power-
sawed elms, whose white meat I could see from my height (CL 62).

The climber of the glass mountain furthermore cites the


definition of the traditional symbol from A Dictionary of Literary
Terms (“it presumably arouses deep feelings and is regarded as
possessing properties beyond what the eye alone sees”), and finally
makes use of what the narrator calls “these conventional means of
attaining the castle” (CL 63). Kafka comes to mind. These
conventional means the climber takes from a story in The Yellow
Fairy Book. In an intertextual interchange of his own status with that
of the climber in the story from this book, he puts into work a
fantastic transformation: “The eagle dug its sharp claws into the
tender flesh [...] The creature in terror lifted him [the actual climber
of the glass mountain] high up into the air and began to circle the
castle [...] The bird rose up in the air with a yelp, and the youth
dropped lightly onto a broad balcony [...] he saw a courtyard filled
with flowers and trees, and there, the beautiful enchanted princess”
(CL 63- 64). The structure of the symbol, the indissoluble
interrelation of vehicle and tenor, is now made the basis of the
narrative process — but in reverse terms. What the climber sees is
the separation of the inseparable, of vehicle and tenor. He now
existentially and painfully experiences the failure of the meaning-
giving function of the symbol, a circumstance that he knew from the
beginning. Yet the existential engagement is cut back, even reversed
by the contrast between existential experience and the diagrammatic
reductive style of the story, which de-existentializes the quality of the
experience. By leaving gaps, rejecting psychological frames, denying
emotion an “adequate” expression, and contrasting ways of
perception and response, Barthelme gains the freedom of playful
ambivalence in the handling of symbolic signification. The climber
proceeds in his narrative: “I approached the symbol, with its layers of
meaning, but when I touched it, it changed into only a beautiful
412 From Modernism to Postmodernism

princess” (CL 64-65). By losing its tenor, the symbolic vehicle loses
the function of a symbol, and becomes “merely” a beautiful princess.
The logical consequence is its deconstruction as a symbol, a process
which here is literalized into physical destruction:

98. I threw the beautiful princess headfirst down the mountain to


my acquaintances.
99. Who could be relied upon to deal with her.
100. Nor are eagles plausible, not at all, not for a moment (CL
65).

In “The Balloon”, the gigantic balloon that, seemingly for no


reason or purpose, enwraps most of Manhattan and thus creates a
“concrete particular” (UP 16) world of its own, is, as the reader finds
out only at the end, the personal expression of “unease” and “sexual
deprivation”, “a spontaneous autobiographical disclosure” (UP 21) of
the narrator on the occasion of his beloved’s absence. When the
pictorial statement of the feeling of deprivation is “no longer
necessary or appropriate” because she has returned from Norway, the
balloon is after twenty-two days dismantled and “stored in West
Virginia, awaiting some other time of unhappiness, sometime,
perhaps, when we are angry with one another” (UP 21). Yet the
balloon is more than the outlet and representation of a private feeling.
It answers a common need: the arousal and expression of
spontaneity, pleasure, unprogrammed feeling, etc. Up to the last
paragraph that reveals its private meaning, the balloon is the image of
the force of possibility, indefiniteness, and the ineffable compared to
the actuality of the real and the fixity of normality: “The balloon, for
the twenty-two days of its existence, offered the possibility, in its
randomness, of mislocation of the self, in contradistinction to the
grid of precise, rectangular pathways under our feet” (UP 21). It
liberates the self from the tyranny of “complex machinery, in
virtually all kinds of operations; as this tendency increases, more and
more people will turn, in bewildered inadequacy, to solutions for
which the balloon may stand as a prototype, or ‘rough draft’” (UP
21). Again Barthelme plays with ironic constructs, using the different
strictures of the symbol. On the one hand, the symbol is restructed in
its meaning, being linked by causality to a concrete reason, i.e., the
“sexual deprivation” and the “unease” of the narrator. On the other
hand, it is radically serial in its “lack of finish” and the infinite
The Space-Time Continuum 413

possibilities of its meaning. In fact, this is ultimately a symbol of


liberating the force of nonmeaning that is the radical openness of
meaning from the stifling forms of meaning. The reactions of people
show “a certain amount of initial argumentation about the ‘meaning’
of the balloon”; this, however,

subsided, because we have learned not to insist on meanings, and they are
rarely even looked for now, except in cases involving the simplest, safest
phenomena. It was agreed that since the meaning of the balloon could
never be known absolutely, extended discussion was pointless, or at least
less purposeful than the activities of those who, for example, hung green
and blue paper lanterns from the warm gray underside, in certain streets, or
seized the occasion to write messages on the surface (UP 16).

More than any other postmodern writer, Barthelme employs


the symbol to deconstruct the symbol and then reconstruct it, which
he does with irony and satire, yet in playful terms (which include the
ironic and the comic modes). Causality as link between vehicle and
tenor is merely experimented and played with; analogy only exists as
connecting principle in that it connects part with part in the sense of
non-analogy. Seriality is openness: it gives the situation autonomy.
As a compositional principle, it links the narrated situations and their
tenors only by indefiniteness, contingency, spontaneity, by liberated
feeling. In its being “not limited, or defined” in its “ability [...] to
shift its shape, to change”, to please “people whose lives were rather
rigidly patterned, persons to whom change, although desired, was not
available” (UP 20-21), the balloon turns into the symbol of the
(limitless freedom of the) imagination itself and the glass mountain
into the symbol of the failure of the imagination to overcome the
cliché and achieve a new release. What is expressed by pictorial
symbols in Barthelme’s so-called picture stories is an emotion of
dissatisfaction and the fundamental desire for a change of principles.
This desire for openness gives occasion to “theorize” about the
symbol in concrete terms and by reflecting about the symbol to
deconstruct it, but then, out of necessity, to reconstruct it, again in
concrete terms, as the signifier of the desire for the other, for energy,
spontaneity, the unpatternable, the force against everything that takes
on narrow and rigid form.
The symbolic method of postmodern fiction makes quite
clear that its central strategy is that which already characterized
modernism, the striving for meaning and its failure, with the dif-
414 From Modernism to Postmodernism

ference that the postmodern failure is fully translated into form and
perspectivized in multiple ways by play, irony, and the comic mode.
The attempt at control by the aesthetic design may be considered as
the inheritance from modern narrative; the knowledge, playful
acceptance, and direct utterance of the failure of control (because of
the multiplication of relations, the situationalizing and serializing of
composition) is the postmodern deconstructive and reconstructive
ingredient of the symbol.

6.3.8. The Labyrinth

The central metaphor for postmodern fiction, the crucial


figuration for its content, design, narrative strategies, the para-
doxicality of its intention and goal, is spatial: it is the labyrinth.103 As
intricate structure, the labyrinth can assume two or, depending on the
viewpoint, three forms. While the first pattern of the labyrinth is
unicursal, the second and third are multicursal.104 The classical Cretan
labyrinth, built by Daedalus at the command of King Minos to exact
revenge upon Athens for the death of his son Androgeus, is
unicursal. According to antique legend, the Minotaur lived in the
maze at Knossos and every nine years devoured or killed the seven
young men and seven young women who were sent from Athens as
tribute to King Minos. Theseus, it is told, put an end to this cruel
practice by entering the labyrinth, slaying the Minotaur and
successfully returning to the entrance, the beginning of the labyrinth,
with the help of a thread that the King’s daughter, Ariadne, had given
him. In spite of the intricacy of the paths, the twisting, unfolding, and
refolding lines of space, the labyrinth is unicursal. It leads unfailingly
to its center and has an affirmative nature. Eco underlines this point
by emphasizing that the classical Daedelian maze is linear and
predetermined; it involves entering, reaching the center, and exiting,
the Minotaur merely being there “to make the whole thing a little
more exciting [...] and [...] one cannot get lost: the labyrinth itself is
an Ariadne thread” (1984b, 80). It is form, only seemingly the
figuration of force, force of the incalculable.
According to Eco, there are two types of the multicursal
labyrinth. The one is centered and coded. Its dominant characteristic
is the presence of false turnings and repeated choices. The turnings
and choices are binary and divide into right or wrong, effective or
The Space-Time Continuum 415

non-effective; the procedure involved in reaching the center and in


finding the way out is a combination of (1) forming a hypothesis and
(2) following it, a process of trial and error, both of which rely on a
definite code, for instance of wholeness, identity, etc. This is the
modernist labyrinth, which includes the possibility of failure, but not
the suspension of dualities and values. It comprises the breaking of
form but not its suspension or radical renewal. The second type of
the multicursal labyrinth is decentered and uncoded. It has no simple
way out and no single correct interpretation. It evolves into the more
radical “rhizomic” labyrinth that confounds reason, reveals the
unknown and engages human beings at the core of their resources for
survival or renewal. The term “rhizomic” is used by Deleuze and
Guattari105 to designate the decentered lines that constitute
multiplicities; rhizomic lines are non-hierarchical lines that connect
with other lines in random, unregulated, open-ended relationships
and shapes. They build a system of ramifications, a flow in a myriad
of directions. There is no beginning and no end, but only the middle
of dynamic movement and continuous change, which can form no
identity. This is the postmodern kind of labyrinth that is pure force,
the force of possibilities. It contains as aspects or dimensions an
indissoluble interface of all the paradoxes mentioned. According to
Barth, the “labyrinth, after all, is a place, in which, ideally, all the
possibilities of choice (of direction in this case) are embodied, and
[...] must be exhausted before one reaches the heart” (1984, 75) — if
one reaches the heart, which nobody does.
The important thing is that this decentered labyrinth contains
the other two, both the classical unicursal and the centered
multicursal. The idea of a center is important even if it is absent, and
the possibility of making right-or-wrong choices is crucial for the
“inclusiveness” of the labyrinth, though there may be no such
choices. Thus the dichotomy of form and force determines the
“rhizomic” labyrinth. It contains form-lines that direct binary op-
positions, then force-lines that resist such “normalcy” and linearity,
and finally lines of pure force that shatter any idea of continuity,
establishing the principle of multiplicity, of a network not of
signifying signs, but of relations between signs capable of limitless,
ever-changing interpretations that turn the labyrinth into a “mode of
conjecture” (realized in Eco’s The Name of the Rose). The labyrinth
can therefore be structured, but only hypothetically, never definitely,
416 From Modernism to Postmodernism

“not only because the rhizome is multi-dimensionally complicated,


but also because its structure changes through the time” (Eco 1984b,
82). Decenterment adds to the labyrinth the modality and
creativeness of infinite possibilities, but also the destructiveness of
waste and sterility, of tedium and failure, in short, of nihilism. With
the suspension of boundaries between subject and object, the
labyrinth ultimately becomes the Self, and the outside world
crumbles. In the work of Borges and other postmodern fictionists, the
labyrinth is nothing more than the Self, but the Self that
paradoxically saves itself from being the victim of the labyrinth by
making itself its heart: “This duration, this feeling of eternity makes
me the center of the labyrinth, in this way I am liberated, while the
labyrinth crumbles” (Borges 55).
The great narrative and symbolic potential of the multicursal
labyrinth, its expandability into infiniteness, makes it attractive for
postmodern authors like Borges, Barth, Barthelme, Calvino, Eco,
Hawkes, Pynchon, Robbe-Grillet, and others. Its ironic structure
constitutes a field of opposing forces held in equilibrium. Depending
on its interpretation, it is either a closed or an open system. It is
entropic and negentropic. It is hermetically sealed and yet
paradoxically gives room to “the old myths of departure, of loss, and
of return” (Foucault 1986, 78). It is journey and destination. It
comprises the notion of trap, or puzzle, or mirror of life and death,
and it also mirrors end and endlessness, both limitless invention and
intricate and tortuous windings. Being endless, it is both sequential
and simultaneous in its orientation. It is determined by secrecy and
open to discovery. It envelops, and it points beyond itself. It is joined
to necessity (at the beginning and the center) and to chance, to
randomness and waste in the maze of paths; it offers protection and
danger, death and resurrection. The labyrinth is constructed of
dualities: rewards and punishments, good and evil, predetermination
and freedom, oneness and polarization, unity and the dissipation of
unity. It is thus the figure of being always on the threshold, and it
shows the order of the enigma. Combining all perspectives into one,
it makes storytelling the symbol of life and consciousness. Life’s and
Consciousness’s twists and transformations give rise to self-
reflexivity and metamorphosis. Foucault speaks of a “meta-
morphosis-labyrinth” (1986, 94; italics added). It opens “the line to
infinity, the other, the lost” as well as “the circle” and “the return to
The Space-Time Continuum 417

the same”. Metamorphosis and the (dis)order of the labyrinth


combine in the movement of language towards infinity (cf.
Barthelme), towards saying “other things with the same words, to
give to the same words another meaning” (1986, 96). That is exactly
what Brautigan does in his novel Trout Fishing in America, when he
establishes a maze of meaning for the title phrase.
There is another important differentiation as to how one
experiences a labyrinth. One can be inside or outside. In the first
case, the temporal element is superimposed on the spatial one and
exerts the supreme determining influence it always has in verbal art,
and especially in narrative; in the second case, the labyrinth reveals
itself as an intricate spatial construct that can have symbolic
meaning. If the narrated person is caught in the maze, and the
temporal aspect of movement dominates the intricacy of the
multicursal design, then the behavior/action of the character takes on
the nature of the quest with a path-goal/exit figuration, even though
the goal may be only an illusion, an hallucination, or a projection.
While a character inside the labyrinth may find his or her situation
inextricable, intrinsically unstable and meaningless, the reader,
surmounting the perspective of the narrated character, may find the
narrative design, seen from “outside”, intricate but meaningful. In the
case of the character, he or she may be confronted with a rhizomic
type of labyrinth that makes no sense at all, while the reader is faced
with the encyclopedic kind of labyrinth that — even if it does not
allow for an unraveling of the lines and one single interpretation —
at least contains clues and symbols as to the range of its significance.
This is the modernist situation in its extreme form, and Kafka’s
Castle is the preeminent example.
In many, if not most, postmodern variants the author will
produce, and both character and reader will enter, an all-
encompassing rhizomic kind of labyrinth, a labyrinth of lines of
force, of contrarieties, of limitless possibilities (of plots and
perspectives) that allow no linear progress, no final conclusion, and
have no ultimate “meaning” in any kind of combination. The
author/narrator emphasizes here the emergence of the labyrinth from
the heart, the center, seeing him- or herself, in spite of the inevitable
presence of intertextuality, as the creator and master of the maze-like
windings and choices (even if this might be an as-if pose). In this
case the time factor is manifest as a process of permanent strategic
418 From Modernism to Postmodernism

change; it is meant to guarantee that the text, or rather, the


communication process between text and reader, does not become
entropic, i.e., fixed in symbolic constellations, but that the labyrin-
thine fictional landscape, seen from “outside”, represents itself as a
scene full of simultaneous possibilities, endlessly changing. By
projecting unlimited possibilities, the labyrinth unfolds not only its
stifling but also its creative negentropic potential in unending paths,
infinite twists, and rewindings, rendering the maze as inexhaustible
narrative form. Even if the conceptual labyrinth is not named as such
and has no specific shape, its relational, diagrammatic figurations
together with the disoriented wanderings of the character(s) and their
experience of bafflement in maze-like situations, or the indicative
physical details, are often enough to evoke the image of the maze.
The creative potential of the labyrinth is heightened by the
fact that the relations within the fictional labyrinth are not only
horizontal. Gaps and empty spaces left in the path and between
points of direction reveal levels below. The labyrinthine motions of
the creative mind in the character or the narrator or both, run on the
surface, because only the surface offers unlimited space. Yet the
yearning for meaning, for values can never be put off completely. If
no core of truth is visible in the decentered maze, if essence as the
depth-dimension is no longer available, and the surface remains
without hierarchy of places so that one position relativizes the other.
Center and goal go, as it were, into hiding and are only expressed in
their absence, as the void, thus forming ex negativo the inexpressible,
vertical dimension of the labyrinth. This void is the place of mystery,
and as such it can be filled with projections that arise out of the waste
of existence, out of fear and disorientation, out of paranoia. They call
up out of nothingness a mysterious, hidden game-master in what is
conceived of as a game of hide and seek, with the narrated person
being played with by an outside Force, a mysterious “They”
(Pynchon), in the multidirectional labyrinths of the fictional world. It
should come as no surprise, therefore, that the concept of waste, the
image of the labyrinth, and the mystery of the void form a cluster of
associations that inform postmodern fiction (see Hoffmann “Waste”).
The Space-Time Continuum 419

6.3.9. The Written Page as Labyrinth of Reading and Seeing:


The Mutual Suspension of Simultaneity and Succession in
Sukenick and Federman

The labyrinth is also one of language. In Beckett’s The


Unnamable, it is the labyrinth of language and the succession of
words that keep the character, the Unnamable, alive. The postmodern
author cannot overcome the difficulty of writing coherently and
meaningfully, of coming to an end; he faces failure and reflects about
it. Sukenick writes in Up:

I must make it up as I go along, the hell with it, I’m finishing today [...]
Maybe I better keep it up a while longer, what am I going to do when I’m
done? No, impossible. It’s dissolving into words, script on paper (329).

In Sukenick the unraveling principle of mere succession


determines both metareflection and the structure of the narrative. In
his novel Out (1973), the shift of situations on the journey “from the
clutter and hassle of the East to the pure space of an empty California
beach” (Klinkowitz 1975, 137) prevents logical order and coherent
plot. But then the spatial labyrinth is transferred to the materiality of
the book, the arrangement of pages, the interspacing of white spaces
on the page, and thus to the reading process. The writer complicates
the order of sequentiality by running the sequence of chapter
numbers against the rising page numbers. Towards the end, the blank
spaces between the verbal units increase until the text finally
withdraws into the empty page, so that the end position of the book is
surrendered by language to dissolution, a drifting-off into the
infiniteness of white space that even abandons the principle of serial
succession. Sukenick finally ends his novel 98.6, according to the
artistic principle of mere succession, by letting his last sentence
unravel without punctuation, and combines the principle of
succession now quite conspicuously with that of simultaneity, the
two structural principles of the multicursal labyrinth, by repeating,
and writing in capital letters, the phrase AT THE SAME TIME:

AT THE SAME TIME my life is unraveling AT THE SAME TIME the


novel is bungled fragments stitched together AT THE SAME TIME
everything is seamless perfect not because because because but AT THE
SAME TIME playing the blues letting it go it is as it is. Another failure
(188).
420 From Modernism to Postmodernism

In fact, it seems that a group of postmodern writers, among


them most prominently Sukenick and Federman, but also Barthelme
(cf. Snow White), have made the abstraction and combination of the
textual units into the purity of succession and simultaneity, of
temporal sequence and spatial form, a new kind of artistic formula
that transforms the modernist semantic concept of wholeness as well
as the ground phenomena of the story, namely suspense and
meaning, into labyrinthine relations of words or word-formations on
the page. The transformation of imagining worlds into “seeing”
words, word designs, and empty spaces on the page dissolves the
priority of the story, makes the medium language and the material
distribution of words and sentences on white space the focus.
Sukenick writes: “Opacity implies that we should direct our attention
to the surface of a work, and such techniques as graphics and
typographical variations, in calling the reader’s attention to the
technological reality of the book, are useful in keeping his mind on
that surface instead of undermining it with profundities”(Surfiction
45). Critics like Alan Wilde have drawn attention to the parallel with
painting: “[I]t’s difficult to avoid the inference that a good deal of
contemporary literature represents a belated response to the by now
familiar imperatives of modern painting”; and he quotes Clement
Greenberg: “The limitations that constitute the medium of painting
— the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of pigment
— were treated by the Old Masters as negative factors that could be
acknowledged only implicitly or indirectly. Modernist painting has
come to regard these same limitations as positive factors that are to
be acknowledged openly” (Horizons 171). It is obvious that for
Sukenick, Federman, but also Barthelme in Snow White, or Gass in
The Tunnel, the spatial medium of the page and its organization is
part of the message, perhaps actually the symbol of the message.
The symbol by now has moved from space, time, character, action,
and language, to the mere materiality of words on the page and the
arrangement of spaces on the page.
Federman has driven this process to the extreme. The subtitle
to the “Pretext” of Take It or Leave It, is called “a spatial
displacement of words”. Spatial displacement of words is here meant
quite literally. Not only does the book have no page numbers (and
therefore no beginning, center, or end) because the order of numbers,
The Space-Time Continuum 421

according to Cassirer would depend on and establish the orders of


space and time, but language itself is also deconstructed into
labyrinthine (non)formations because “the conventions which logic
has forced on syntax must be broken open” (C. Olson 120). In
addition to the fact that many pages are typographically different (a
method taken over from Federman’s first novel Double or Nothing,
where no two pages look fully alike), all forms of order end in mere
word-patterns that disown any idea of narrative and logical order.
The reason for these experiments of course is the focusing of
attention not even on language, which is a system of order, but the
materiality of words and their arrangement. This strategy aims, as
“concrete” poetry does, at a “visually perceptible literature” (Kriwet)
by forcing the reader to lay the emphasis on simultaneously seeing
the page and reading it. Thus the form of language and the com-
position of the page are turned from stabilizing form into disruptive
force. By an unconventional arrangement of the words on the page,
Federman deconstructs not only the referential quality of language
and the good continuation of time (a continuation that would result
from an easy prevailing of semantics over the stoppage of words),
but also disrupts even the good continuation of words by spatially
displacing them into a multicursal labyrinth. The first page of the
“Pretext” (and of the book) looks like the following:

One could imagine that it happened this way:


in the beginning
words scattered
by chance
and in all directions!
Ucnrleeege
notoldnris!

Wild lines of words would have crossed the sheets of paper


obeying only their own furor.

The pencil of the writer


his fingertips
his pen (machine) would have followed them.
Little by little
as words became more numerous
more compact
gathered together
rushed together
into certain regions of the paper
422 From Modernism to Postmodernism

small fields of forces would have localized themselves : eddies


— knots
crests
contours of words:
spontaneous designs of filings
climbing up the pages in
and down
mad laughter!

Sukenick — referring both to Sharon Spencer’s book on the


spatial novel, Space, Time and Structure in the Modern Novel,
discussed above, and Federman’s Double or Nothing — speaks of
“techniques as juxtaposition and manipulation of the print on the
space of the page” that can attain a “spatialization of its form”, and
“communicate by means of pattern rather than sequence in a manner
approaching that of the plastic arts”. Yet even though “[t]he picture is
filled out [...] there is no sense of development involved” (1975, 38).
The reader, in contrast to the recipient of the concrete poem, has to
read on over many pages, and that, of course, is a process in time, a
process of “completion” (my emphasis), as Barthelme calls it,
completion of the endless possibilities of the decoded labyrinth. In
fact, what happens here is a struggle between temporal and spatial
principles of (dis)order, between the simultaneity of words on the
page and their succession, both principles playing neither on the
referential nor the formal/structural levels of narrative, nor even on
the linguistic plane but rather, so to speak, three times removed, on
the theatrical stage of the page in an endless labyrinthine process of
crossovers from temporal into spatial form and vice versa. Indeed,
“[w]hat reigns here is an indefinite addition [in terms of simultaneity
and succession] but also no summation” (Federman ToL, “Pretext”),
a process of addition during which, in Federman’s phrase, “the words
of the text are watching themselves being written and comment on
their own existence, their own being as word-beings while they are
being scribbled” (LeClair and McCaffery 137). The result is a
tension between language as product of the writer and as “an active,
self-ruminating process” (McCaffery); or rather, to use the other
notions that Federman and many of the postmodernists like to
employ for the narrative process, it is a combination, an overlay or
blending of consciousness, voice, and language, meant to create the
force of liberation “from all sorts of misconceived and preconceived
notions” (LeClair and McCaffery 137) of form.
7. Character

Character can be understood as essence or function. It is (1) a


unique substance, an autonomous subject, and the strategic place for
will, desire, freedom, and responsibility. Human nature is universal
and elemental; the self and the world are accessible to rational
epistemology. Or, (2) character is a function and particle in a network
of historical beliefs, conventions, in a system of operations that
sanctions only its own projects. The subject is the place of temporal
difference, not permanent substance; it confirms and interprets only
that which has already happened. In the first case, literature will be
concerned with the process of characterization and its development
from existence to essence, with the exploration and interpretation of
the human psyche, the idiosyncrasies, desires, and needs of the self,
its moral code, its identity with itself or its split and alienation. A
system of implications directs the reader to discover behind the
surface the “depth”, the true self and its timeless structure. In the
second instance, the self-centered character is an artificial construct,
a conventional idea, a mask that indeed may mask the fact that it is a
mask and therefore needs to be de-masked. Character is here never a
result but always a process directed by others, by organizations, or
forces. It is not homogeneous but heterogeneous, is defined not by an
essential unique identity but a historical condition and a multiplicity
of roles in the mobile interrelation with other people and the
environment, with power-systems, institutions, religious and cultural
traditions, and language-patterns. The idea that the essential
individual is an axiomatic given is revealed as illusion, as inherently
ideological, and can be shown already to be a problem in traditional
and modern texts.
The structure of the narrated situation reflects the concept of
character as essence or function. If character is conceived as essence,
it dominates the situation, and the latter concentrates on the internal
and external relations that rouse feelings, thoughts, and actions, on
the connection between appearance and true core, on the moral bent,
on conflicts and change. If the character does not dominate as
424 From Modernism to Postmodernism

essence but is only an agent in the creation of the world, then the
narrated situation will be decentralized; the character loses its
superior role in the situation and ceases to exist as a self-centered
unity and a primary frame of reference and becomes subservient to
temporality and the primacy of language, pattern, and reception. This
is the victory of the surface-view of character over the depth-view,
which has become a problem or has seemingly disappeared in
postmodern fiction. Already Brecht, according to Walter Benjamin,
noted that “[d]epth doesn’t get you anywhere at all. Depth is a
separate dimension, it’s just depth — and there’s nothing whatsoever
to be seen in it” (1977a, 110). And Richard Rorty protests against
“the self-deception of thinking that we possess a deep, hidden,
metaphysically significant nature which makes us ‘irreducibly’
different from inkwells or atoms” (1980, 373). Don DeLillo remarks
(setting “modern” for “postmodern”) that “[m]any modern characters
have a flattened existence — purposely — and many modern
characters exist precisely nowhere” (DeCurtis 62). Depthlessness is
used quite intentionally as a counter-strategy against aesthetic and
psychological closure evolving from the depth-view of identity and
truth. Against the ideology of “depth”, the novel employs “the flattest
possible characters in the flattest possible landscape in the flattest
possible diction” (Newman 28). Yet, again, this is only half the truth.
For the reader, even behind the “flattest possible characters” looms
the whole humanistic tradition, the belief in psychological depth and
the existential self.
In the following sections, character is placed in the context
of traditional-essentialist, of structural and poststructural theories.
The idea of an essential self emphasizes the notions of identity,
uniqueness, and authenticity, of a stable core and an indissoluble
center of the self. It comes to dominate modernist fiction.
Postmodernism no longer highlights interiority and the psychological
code, though it does not abolish the idea of a full-fledged character.
Structuralism turns character from being an essence into a
functionary, an actant in a process or in literary designs, a vehicle for
collecting qualities and actions. Function is defined as intratextual
function, while essence is an alien concept externally construed.
Poststructuralism and its culture of difference emphasize immanence
and proliferation, indefiniteness and mobility, the dissemination of
meaning and the avoidance of closure. Multiplicity, simultaneity, and
Character 425

openness are the keywords for the approach to character. Both


structuralism and poststructuralism combine to dissolve character as
unique and authentic self, but they obviously cannot do without the
idea of a “subject” as the bearer or meeting point of energies, and
forces, narrative processes and forms. We will analyze the different
concepts of character that rival and struggle with one another, mix in
the concrete cases, and of course have to confront the expectations of
the reader. A short analysis of Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew will
exemplify the postmodern play with both the fictionality of character
and the idea of its externality to narrative and language.

7.1. The Systematic View: The Essentialist Self, Identity,


Uniqueness, and Authenticity

One central problem in the analysis of the narrated character


derives from the fact that the schema of characterization (as every
schema) is dual, that character in fact is double-coded, is imitation
and construction, stabilized by expectation. “[C]haracters are utterly
embedded in texts and utterly detachable from them” (Hochman 74);
they are both people and words. On the one hand, they are mental
and linguistic constructs, textual entities, with connotations of
plurality, dispersion and multiple stories of the self,106 and on the
other they have strong bonds to what in the lifeworld (also that of the
reader) are considered the properties of character, even if the
characters are reduced in the text to “figures”. 107 (For reasons of
convenience and to avoid the pitfalls of all too rigid categorization,
we will use interchangeably the terms “character”, “figure”, and also
“subject”, with only a few exceptions.) Roland Barthes explains: “On
the one hand, the characters (whatever one calls them — dramatis
personae or actants) form a necessary plane of description, outside
of which the slightest reported ‘actions’ cease to be intelligible; so
that it can be said that there is not a single narrative in the world
without ‘characters,’ or at least without agents. Yet on the other
hand, these — extremely numerous — ‘agents’ can be neither
described nor classified in terms of ‘persons’” (1977, 105). John
Barth derives from this tension between the textual and referential
dimension of character the “tragic — or skeptical — view of
characterization”, namely that “the characters that are achieved are
finally fictitious characters. The tragic view of characterization is that
426 From Modernism to Postmodernism

we cannot, no matter how hard we try, make real people by language.


We can only make verisimilitudinous people. That view itself is on
the minds of the characters themselves in a novel like LETTERS, and
it’s very much on the author’s mind in a novel like LETTERS”
(Ziegler and Bigsby 38).
It is obvious that the fictional character can never surpass
being a construct, but this construct can also never lose its connection
with what Barth calls “real people” and their essential concerns. It is
true of all texts that the relation to “real” people and their concerns
can never be fully suspended. This means that the (essentialistic)
concept of character cannot just disappear. Indeed, even as a “minus
function” (Lotman), as mere presence in absence, the full-fledged
character of the humanistic tradition acts as a horizon to and a
corrective in the text. Jameson speaks of “the stubbornly anthro-
pomorphic nature of our present categories of character” (1975a,
211). The double-poled orientation of the fictional character towards
imaginary constructedness and dependent relationship to “life”
creates what one might call the paradox of characterization in
postmodern fiction, a dialectic without synthesis. Though this
paradox is effective in every narrative, it leads to different results in
every single text; in Barthes’s words, the “idea of a model
transcendent to several texts” has to be counterbalanced by the
analysis of the individual character in the individual text, for “each
text [...] must be treated in its difference, ‘difference’ being
understood here precisely in a Nietzschean or Derridean sense”
(1971, 44). Both the general matrix of characterization in fiction and
its individual expression in the concrete text rely on certain basic
assumptions and qualifications about the human self that have been
developed by philosophy, psychology, and sociology and are marked
by wholeness, uniqueness, autonomy, and self-awareness, a
development of ideas one need take note of when discussing the role
of character in postmodern fiction.
The character-models advanced by philosophy and
psychology of course are in themselves divergent and evolve out of
the spirit of the times. Two philosophical traditions that hold
different concepts of identity are important in the historical
development of character-models.108 The continental philosophical
tradition from Descartes to Leibniz and Hegel assigns substantial
identity (Descartes, Leibniz), or at least an a priori unity (Kant), to
Character 427

the creative, absolute “I” as an all-embracing thinking subject that


actively structures the world. The Anglo-American philosophical
tradition from Locke to John Stuart Mill and Behaviorism inclines to
empiricism and eclecticism and stresses instead a rather passive and
receptive “I”, whose identity has strong social components. William
James, in trying to reconcile the two philosophical traditions, can be
considered the founder of the modern conception of identity
(Principles of Psychology). His psychological distinctions, which
helped to make psychology a modern pragmatic discipline in its own
right, show the changes from substantialism to relativism (and
relationism). He no longer speaks of “the” world but of many worlds
of current perception (though the world of the senses had for him still
a preferential status). He thus paved the way (just as Nietzsche did
with his “perspectivism”) for the postmodern conception of multiple
realities of equal status and the possibility of entertaining different
attitudes towards the created worlds. James’s pragmatic and
relativistic concept of the self in the world thus opens the way for a
definition of the self by means of the multiple modes in which the
self relates to the world. Freud’s analysis of the unconscious regions
of the mind complicates the understanding of character by giving it a
“vertical” structure with a preprogrammed conflict between the
conscious and the unconscious, with the dialectic of the “id” and the
“superego”, and the “ego” as a mediator between the two. Under
postmodern auspices, the balancing power of the ego, however, has
waned and the force of the “fragmenting” and “desublimating”
“unstructured desires” appear able to dissolve the socially
determined, past-oriented, repressive stability of character in favor of
the dimension of the future, of possibility, kinesis, and “freedom”
(Bersani).109
The interiority of character is highly individual, structured by
private thoughts, emotions and desires, and not conducive to
abstraction in categories of definition; and yet, a system of
differentiation is obviously necessary for heuristic purposes. There
have been attempts to establish categories that separate full-fledged,
comprehensive, mature, or outstanding characters from less
developed, conventional, and stereotyped ones. Interestingly enough,
the attempts at a typology of character in fiction do not rely on
character alone but summon other viewpoints, the support of the
natural constituents of the situation, of time and space. E.M. Forster
428 From Modernism to Postmodernism

rests his distinction of characters on time. Using a psychological


point of view, he defines “round” characters in temporal terms by
surprise and development, and “flat” characters by their lack of them;
being without inner life, the latter “are constructed round a single
idea or quality” (73-81). Though the opposition of “flat” and “round”
is too schematic and does not take into account the character’s
function — the ability of a “flat” character like Huckleberry Finn, for
instance, to focus the social world in which he lives and thus to gain
in stature110 — this differentiation of characters has been extremely
influential because it rests on an elementary category. Time suggests
change, growth, evolution, and progress and thus offers a synthesis
of the natural (time) and social frame (character, action) of the
narrated situation. While Forster’s typology of characters is based on
time, on dynamis and stasis, surprise and development, or the lack of
them, Jurij Lotman uses the other possibility of connecting character
and the natural frame. He employs a “spatial” viewpoint. His
character-types are based on cultural boundaries. These boundaries
are ethical or epistemological, defined by culture and break-of-
culture. They exist between the good and the bad, and between the
known and the unknown. While the conventional character remains
within the boundaries of tradition and conforms to the established
rules, the other type transgresses the borderline into the unusual and
the unknown; this character is strange in many of its traits and
extraordinary in temperament, in vision and sense of duty (see
Lotman). It features an intense desire for openness, expansion, and
change, and the extreme energy that empowers desire.
Postmodern fiction blurs many of these differentiations. The
dualism of Forster’s character model is cancelled; the opposition
between “flat” and “round” has lost its heuristic usefulness since the
idea of essence has lost its currency, and “flatness” and “roundness”
have become a matter of perspective and merge in the
multidimensional being. The transition of boundaries that Lotman
makes his distinguishing feature has been the target of irony and
play. The hero’s break with culture in Gaddis’s J.R. or Barth’s Giles
Goat-Boy induces a satire on the reifying consistencies of culture that
engulf the individual rather than a liberating expansion in heroic
deeds. There is not even a gleam of utopianism, neither in terms of
the hero’s deed nor the change of the social environment. A
combination of perspectives complicates the picture. Just as the
Character 429

social milieu is the target of satire, the hero and his deeds become
victims of the comic mode.
The question, however, remains: what is a fully grown
character? Forster’s notions of surprise and development for many
critics are too formal and simple to allow for a full account of the
inner life of the character. The life of the psyche is private, fluid, and
uncategorizable: it is pure force. If one adheres to the idea that
character is judgeable by “objective” standards, the fluidity and
opacity of consciousness hamper rationalizations, and one need
engage in intellectual values and morals, and judge actions in terms
of morals, i.e., emphasize the forms of structured behavior. W.J.
Harvey and Charles Child Walcutt follow this path. Their ideas of
what the narrated character is or should be derive from their shared
conviction that the character has an integral personality that is
knowable, that we can indeed have an “immediate, even visceral”
sense of a person’s “reality” (7). The character is formed in the
conflict of values. The author’s task is to provide an “intrinsic
knowledge” of the characters he or she creates because the intimate
knowledge of the self is the “prime reason for our enjoyment of
fiction” (W.J. Harvey 32). In spite of the moral reasoning, one can
again describe Harvey and Walcutt’s argument in terms of space and
time; in fact, all typologies of character are created with the
assistance of the natural frame, i.e., space and time. In their case, the
character has a steadfast center; it does not change, and (the influence
of) time is minimized in favor of psychic (“spatial”) stability. Or
rather, time and the force of conflict, trial, and proof of worth are
used to confirm the stability of form, of the center. Walcutt
emphasizes the necessity of providing the reader with a “knowledge-
experience” of the character, a knowledge that is “detached,
aesthetic, and intellectual”. He foregrounds as integrative and de-
finatory instances the character’s “moral bent and intellect. The first
is the way the person reacts to a situation and translates his reaction
into action; the second is the way he thinks about himself and his
situation” (17).111 W.J. Harvey emphasizes decision-making, i.e.,
motivation, conflict and change, and action in terms of form, under
the heading of “Time, Identity, Causality and Freedom” (22). John
Bailey, finally, adds a variant by advocating as decisive factor of
personality-creation a universal feeling, i.e., “love”, which again
forms and defines the “separate [...] uniqueness of our existence”
430 From Modernism to Postmodernism

(36).112 Harvey and Walcutt react negatively to the characters of


twentieth-century novels because they are “unknowable” and thus
“unsatisfactory” (346-47). For W.J. Harvey, in fact, the character
portrayals in the novels of the nineteenth century are “far greater than
their modern successors” (219). This line of thought could only
diagnose “Character as a Lost Cause”, which is the title of a panel
discussion in 1978. Mark Spilka notes that “[c]haracter has not been
a viable critical concept for some time in novel study” (197).

7.2. The Historical View of the Essentialist Character:


Modernism vs. Postmodernism

The character-concepts that depend on intellect, morals, and


responsible action, i.e., on forms of control, of course become
unsatisfactory, when, in modernism, instead of psychic stability,
“moral bent” and responsible action, psychic activity and desire,
consciousness and awareness of the complexities of the world, i.e.,
the forces of the mind, come to be the yardsticks of personality. With
the rise of the stream-of-consciousness novel (Joyce, Virginia Woolf,
Faulkner, etc.),113 the “spatial” elements of form, stability, invariable
values (good or bad), rationality, and transparency, are replaced by
temporal elements, movement and change, instantaneity and
dependence on the moment, deferral and the ineffable, which,
however, establish a new “spatial” concept, that of crossovers,
simultaneity, possibility (of roles, chances, meanings), which en-
gender the symbolic potential of the modern novel. The form-
oriented, essentialist character-concept, however, is by no means
suspended; it concentrates in the modern novel on the notions of
identity, uniqueness, and authenticity. Yet it is infinitely complicated
by the acknowledgment of the forces of consciousness, their
extension “horizontally” in terms of stream and time and “vertically”
in layers of consciousness and unconsciousness, the id, ego, and
superego, and their struggle with one another, to use Freud’s notions.
Consciousness as the framework of character is further complicated
in modern narrative by the fact that interior processes are steered by
and projected upon sensory perceptions. While the recognition of an
intimate relationship between the self and the world of the senses
leads to a widening of the concept of knowledge by emphasizing
body consciousness, the concentration on consciousness, on the inner
Character 431

world, generates an isolation of character from the forms of social


order. Under the conditions set by the defamiliarization of the world
and the alienation from society, the character’s quest for meaning is
primarily a forceful, self-powered quest for self-identity. Social
identity no longer plays a decisive role. When morals, truths, and
actions have become diffuse, priorities change, and this change of
priorities calls forth new literary strategies that are able to discover
and represent psychic energy and the forces of consciousness, of
psychic and existential time, the moment of being or revelation, etc.,
while social problems are subordinated to psychological ones. A
study of the new literary methods can convey the important insight
that the combination of form and force acts as a “technique” of
“discovery” (Schorer).
The postmodern novel deconstructs the modern, interiorized
concept of character. With the dissolution of totalizing ideas like
“reality”, meaning, and the self, the modern psychological notions of
identity and authenticity are relativized and transformed. The
deconstruction of the self-centered character, however, is not only a
postmodern affair. It starts with modern fiction — at the latest. It is a
development that begins already in the nineteenth-century novel and
is carried on in modernism. D.H. Lawrence writes with regard to his
novel The Rainbow (1915): “it is the inhuman will, call it physiology,
or like Marinetti — physiology of matter, that fascinates me. I don’t
so much care about what the woman feels [...] You mustn’t look in
my novel for the old stable ego of the character” (198). Gertrude
Stein turns against character and plot; she says that she intends “to
begin to kill which is not dead, the nineteenth century which was so
sure of evolution and prayer” (1974, 120). Virginia Woolf states in
“Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” that “in or about December, 1910,
human character changed” (1966-67, 320).
These remarks do not indicate the deconstruction of
character, but a change in the system of co-ordinates. The social
bonds become secondary; the character turns self-referential and is
set in the framework of universal forces. This development, however,
does not lead to a stabilization of the self but to its ultimate
decomposition, which, paradoxically, is the result of focusing the
attention almost exclusively on the self, on the liberation of psychic
force from social and moral form. On the one hand, the protagonists
of modern texts are individualized by their consciousness of crisis
432 From Modernism to Postmodernism

and disruption and by their quest for identity and wholeness, on the
other, however, the characters, individualized by their existential
crisis, disintegrate into desublimated desires, attitudes, aspects, and
basic archetypal energies. Virginia Woolf demonstrates this
contradiction: “I believe that all novels [...] deal with character [...] it
is to express character [...] that the form of the novels, so clumsy,
verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive has been evolved”
(1966-67, 324). And then she notes: “characters are to be merely
views; personality must be avoided at all costs” (1973, 60).
Furthermore, the experience of an increasing complexity of life, of
the explosive multiplication of information, the irreversible separa-
tion of the social sectors, of economy, social institutions, politics, and
culture, in short, the recalcitrance of the outer world and its lack of
rationality and humanity do not only cause a retreat from the outer
world and a turn towards the subject, but also effect a loss of stable
criteria for the assessment of character. The aesthetic function of the
character, not its essence, now begins to step into the foreground.
Again, Virginia Woolf writes, rather at a loss: “You see one thing in
character, and I another. You say it means this, and I that. And when
it comes to writing, each makes a further selection on principles of
his own” (1966-67, 325). Yet the unlimited energy and power of the
individual to resist, or rather, in the terms of Faulkner’s Nobel Prize
acceptance speech, to “endure” guilt, estrangement, decenterment
and threatening senselessness, still make the character a person.114
In postmodern fiction, character does not disappear; it in fact
retains the potential that the traditional and modern narratives created
for the self, even if the new fiction does not make the conventional or
expected used of it. Elkin in an interview says about his fiction: “It is
concerned with the self, but not with the events that occur to the self”
(Ziegler and Bigsby 103). Barth has a number of pertinent things to
say about postmodern fictional character. In a much-cited statement,
he notes that “the used-upness of certain forms or the felt exhaustion
of certain possibilities [in our case, the uniqueness of character] —
[is] by no means necessarily a cause for despair”. As an example, he
praises Borges, who “confronts an intellectual dead end and employs
it against itself to accomplish new human work” — the intellectual
dead end being plot and the authentic, essential self. Indeed, “it might
be conceivable to rediscover validly the artifices of language and
literature [...] even characterization! Even plot! — if one goes about
Character 433

it the right way, aware of what one’s predecessors have been up to”
(1984, 69-70, 68). He says about his own mode of characterization:
“those characters who don’t actually dissolve by the end of the novel
do indeed come through as characters should in a plot — if not an
affirmation of themselves — then to a kind of integration of
themselves”, even though, of course, “what is integrated is not a
person but a fictitious character” (Ziegler and Bigsby 38). In the
“Perseid”, Perseus’s “problem is the mature sentient individual’s
usual problem in middle life, that is, to carry out the next
development of a personality or a profession or a career” (Ziegler
and Bigsby 29). In a discussion with John Hawkes, Barth refers to
the obvious contrast between the former’s theory of narrative and his
narrative practice. He speaks reproachfully of Hawkes’s “infamous
obiter dictum that plot, character, setting, and theme are the natural
enemies of fiction”, and notes that he, Barth, finds his “novels to be
dramaturgically whole”, in other words, enriched with character and
plot. Hawkes, excusing himself by his youth at the time of his
statement, adds: “I will recant and say that plot [and one might add,
“character”] is of course necessary, even though I cannot create a
plot and still do not know what a plot is” (LeClair and McCaffery
14). Hawkes remarks in another statement: “I knew that the world of
The Cannibal would be a configuration of unconscious life [... ;]
most of my fiction is a configuration of the unconscious” (Ziegler
and Bigsby 172), a “quest into the unconscious” (184), though he is
not concerned with what in modernism figures as the identity quest
(for wholeness and authenticity): “I am not interested in the [...] quest
and all of that” (182).
If the character is conceived as an individual in postmodern
fiction, it is less known, less cognizant, more opaque to interpretation
and understanding than were its forebears in modern fiction. It is
enigmatic, with obsessive, traumatic, or paranoiac traits. Its psychic
make-up would not fit Walcutt’s and Harvey’s terms for the
establishment of character, for it is not predictable, is rather
incoherent, fragmentary and contingent and refuses to move
“forward” or to enter a process of orientation from appearance to
essence, from a state of not-knowing towards enlightened truth,
ethical demands, and an essential selfhood, a totalizing self. It is
bound in the dialectic of self and role. In Barth’s terms: “My
‘mythic’ characters carry on uneasy and precarious dialogues with
434 From Modernism to Postmodernism

themselves, with their own pasts, with the roles that they assume and
play or which are given them [... ;] these roles that never add up to
oneself but certainly are not separate from oneself” (Ziegler and
Bigsby 29). According to Barth, the “equilibria that we arrive at are
always more or less unstable, and the equilibrium that one may re-
arrive at or re-attain is also likely to be an uneasy, delicate,
temporary equilibrium. In the language of systems analysis, their
lives evolve from one unstable equilibrium to a new unstable
equilibrium” (Ziegler and Bigsby 29). A character in postmodern
fiction is subject to the force of time, is always differing from itself
since the fixity of form, of identity, is endlessly deferred; the
narrator’s or the character’s self-examination (if there can be such a
thing) fails to consider and reveal what Walcutt calls “the moral and
philosophical implications” (25) of feelings, reflections, motivations,
decisions, actions (see also Guzlowski). Growing zones of
uncertainty appear instead, what Borges calls the “fundamental
vagueness”: the impossibility of answering the vital questions about
the self, of gaining more than fragmentary knowledge about causes
and effects, origins and goals and the machinations of the world, the
discernment, again in Borges’ words, that “there is no intellectual
exercise which is not ultimately useless” (Ficciones 19, 53). Elkin’s
characters are “energized” by “the will” and by “irrational desire”.
These characters have an immense power: “Each protagonist moves
the other characters around as if they were pawns, or tries to”. What
he likes about them is “the energy of ego” (LeClair and McCaffery
119-120).
The distinguishing features of the character do not, as in
modernism, evolve from isolated problems of identity and
authenticity of the self. The psychic state of the self is determined by
the lack of balance between self and world, by fundamental
uncertainty. When an individual character plays a role, the
encroaching world plays a counter-role. The world is again an
important partner of the self, not only as giver of impulses and a
medium of projections or as milieu and a realm of causality and
order, but also as something that is as opaque as the self, is the
mysterious “other” and as such, together with the self, the cause of
ontological uncertainty. Being enveloped in human ideas, concepts,
and values that are seen by postmodernists to be fictions of the mind,
the world “itself”, whatever that is, disappears in vagueness and
Character 435

obscurity, and no longer offers an identity-promoting contact with a


measurable, outer instance. The relations between the self and the
world are directionless and do not contribute to a sense of clarity and
(self) understanding. The communication between self and world
fails in two different ways, depending on whether the characters are
outer-directed or inner-directed. In the first case, they place their
energies and efforts of self-understanding outside, within the world
in which they act as indefatigable participants. They finally discover,
however, the emptiness within (Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show, The
Franchiser, Nixon in Coover’s The Public Burning), and they
recognize that they lead a “life, deprived of all the warrants of
personality” (282). In the other case, the characters are enclosed in
the self and have difficulties of facing the world in terms of
experience and feeling the impenetrable maskedness of the self in its
communication with the world (Barth, The End of the Road, The Sot-
Weed Factor, “Menelaiad”). In both cases there is a lack of
mediation between, and unity of the within and the without.
Reflection of course turns both ways, ponders the inside and
the outside, thinks about causes and achievements, reality and
meaning. Kohler in Gass’s The Tunnel notes: “We are embarrassed
by experience. [...] Life suddenly becomes a dirty joke. A cause? a
reason? What is not a cause?” (151) He “fail[s] to understand” (218),
in fact “wonder[s] [...] if there’s a real Real behind all this rigmarole”
(422), and “can honestly say I have accomplished Nothing” (468).
He feels “an emptiness” (349) in himself because “there was no
world around our weary ears, only meaning; we were being stifled by
significance” (343); he reflects on the role of a thinker: “were I a
thinker of real thoughts, I think I would think only about the
evanescent, and the character and condition of consciousness;
because I know that is all I am” (467). He imagines an epitaph:
“HERE LIES YOUNG ANONYMOUS KOHLER WHO DIED
FROM A PROLONGED LACK OF REFERENCE” (371). Of
course, thought and feeling combine in the experience of
estrangement. The latter reaches a high point in paranoia. Its
obsessions, especially in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, signify an
extremely impaired relationship to the world and paradoxically mark
both an enclosure within the self and a domination from outside by
the System. Paranoia is a kind of postmodern depth-view of
character; it is the postmodern version of the modern, split self. It
436 From Modernism to Postmodernism

transfers the split ego-consciousness into the relation between the


self and the world. Oedipa in The Crying of Lot 49 is initially
motivated in her perception of the world by her dissatisfaction with
the mere surface quality of her social life; she looks for the better
Other in her search for the Tristero, the underground communication
system, but her failure to attain certainty in her outward moves
reflects back into the inner state of her psyche that vacillates between
the feeling of soundness and madness, surface and depth.
The epistemological search for personal and universal truth
is countered by the general ontological uncertainty about the
condition of the world. It is no longer the question of “who am I” that
has to be answered but above all the question of “what is the world
like that I am placed in”. Both self and world are constitutionally
opaque. Of all postmodern novels, Gaddis’s The Recognitions,
together with Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, are the most sustained
expressions of the new uncertainty in psychic terms. Under the
weight of the experienced ambivalences and uncertainties of the
world, the contrasts between falseness and genuineness, seeming and
being, indeed mask and ego lose their clear-cut contours; the
consciousness of the self turns opaque, becomes a mystery to itself.
In The Recognitions, Hannah says of Herschel: “Dissociated
personality [...] He’s not sure who he is any more, whether he is
anyone at all for that matter. That’s why he wants a tattoo, of course.
Simply a matter of ego-identification” (Rec 181). At the end of the
book, Stanley, one of the two genuine artist-figures, recognizes inner
“conflicts he did not yet understand” and poses “questions he could
not answer now, and he sensed, might never” (951). Esme, a main
female character, is afraid of “close scrutiny [...] someone from
outside might discover something in her she did not know about
herself” (270). She muses about the relation between name and self:
“How were they all so certain? calling her ‘Esme’: they knew she
was Esme when she did not know, who she was or who Esme, if both
were the same, every moment, when they were there, or when she
was alone, both she” (276). She tries to commit suicide. In this book,
the question of identity is obfuscated by the dialectic of feeling
(anxiety, bewilderment) and knowing, an opposition that allows for
no synthesis, and by the superimposition of layers of consciousness,
of perception, feeling, desire and reflection, which do not combine
into unity but act against one another, producing confusion. Self-
Character 437

expression is here a parody of self-expression. The truth is beyond


grasp: “When people tell a truth they do not understand what they
mean, they say it by accident, it goes through them and they do not
recognize it” (481). Being unable to find in his father the source of
understanding and help that he needs, Wyatt, the artist-protagonist of
the book, cries out in utter pain: “No one knows who I am” (468) —
including himself.
The problem that postmodern fiction faces is the tension
between the idea of the authentic self and the lack of its realization, a
dialectic of idea and actualizability that is reminiscent of
romanticism but remains without the possibility of synthesis. This
dialectic is important for postmodern fiction because even if the
character, for whatever reason, is disintegrated, the idea of character
may and will remain intact and present. A reference to the Marxist
theory of character, the belief that character is the “effect” and the
mirror of the social “system” (Lukács, Jameson, Political
Unconscious) may here clarify the issue of character. According to
the Marxist mirror theory the character in postmodern narrative
would be the result of postmodern social and cultural conditions. For
the Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton, the postmodern subject is a
“dispersed, decentred network of libidinal attachments, emptied of
ethical substance and psychical interiority, the ephemeral function of
this or that act of consumption, media experience, sexual
relationship, trend or fashion” (1984, 71).115 This is a bird’s-eye view
that displays a number of weaknesses. It ignores in its one-
dimensionality the constitutional tension between idea and reality or
realizability, here of the unique, centered character that Eagleton
gives universal validity; this stance furthermore neglects the
historical circumstances that determine the ideal of character and its
conditioning by time and social change. The Marxist view here
approaches the essentialist, moral notions of Harvey and Walcutt.
Eagleton presupposes, without expressing any doubt or hesitation,
the factual existence in the past, or rather, the possibility in the
future, of the self-determined, unique, and psychologically coherent
self that he makes his rule of measurement for social criticism,
though such a self is and always has been a fiction.
Yet again, this counter-argument against the theoretical view
is too one-dimensional because the opposition of reality and fiction is
not clear-cut. The separation of idea and reality does in fact not say
438 From Modernism to Postmodernism

anything about the reality of the ideal or idea of character since there
is a mental reality that is as real, or even more so, than a factual
reality. Though the construct of a socially responsible and self-
fulfilling self has come to be seen as an ideological construct that
never existed as a factual reality, this does not mean that the idea of
such an undispersed centered self, of a free person, does not have the
reality of desire, emotion, and thought, or cannot initiate the desire
for its substantiation. The realizability of the ideal of character may
be an illusion, and, as far as this idea of character is bound to its
realizability, it may be an illusion, too. But it is quite real in its
function as a signpost that shows the direction for improvement. It
has functioned socially as an image of personality that has provided a
humanist sense of reality and of character and helped structure
human intellectual and practical life — at least in Western countries.
Yet another objection may arise, not against the realizability
of a full-fledged centered character but its desirability. Its usefulness
may be doubted because at this late date there is less confidence in
rationality, stability, and centeredness. Even if the humanist idea of a
self-reliant and responsible character is rightly seen as a great
achievement that empowered the striving for freedom and social
rights, it may now be time to have certain reservations about this
model of a “round” character. The desired, in fact demanded
orientation towards the role-model of a centered, self-determined,
full-fledged self may be regarded not only as a chance for the
character but also criticized as a repressive influence that forces a
specific model of behavior and thought on everybody and causes
neurosis and guilt, and even impedes social integration when a
character does not live up to the demands of the model (or, for that
matter, concentrates itself entirely on the enhancement of the self).
And finally, the unique self with a depth-core may be considered not
only as fiction or as a trauma, but quite practically as a hindrance in
the first place, a restriction of the energy-flow, a confinement of the
self and a curtailment of its chances of extension, in a horizontal
direction of metamorphosis and transformation. The “reduction” of
the self, the abandonment of its essence, its core, then do not only
appear under negative aspects but also as the chance of openness,
flexibility, and adaptability. The de-centered self, which Foucault
and the other poststructuralists see as the basis of “nomadism” and of
multiple subject-formations, allows various roles to be played and
Character 439

strategies of resistance to be developed, resistance against the fixed


totalizations of church, state, and tradition.
Though all these ideas and deliberations, and their tensions
and contradictions, are external to the text, they influence author,
text, and reader as pre-understandings of character, pre-
interpretations that cannot be deleted but at most allow for choices,
combinations, and montage-strategies, for foreground-background,
presence-absence constellations. This multi-dimensionality of
character makes for complexity. The reductions of the character to a
“subject” and of the subject to the autonomous “voice” of the text
and of the voice of the text to a mere language figuration, turn
character into a composite affair; in the background, all the ideas,
models, and tensions of character wait for re-entry and are actually
always there as possible frames of reference. This presence-absence
constellation makes it necessary for the critic to include them in his
reflections on the text, if not as actualities, then as virtualities.

7.3. Structuralism, the Decenterment of Character, and the


Creation of the Subject

The character cannot be abolished in narration, whatever its


deconstruction and deformation, since it is one of the constituents of
the narrated situation, which is the constituent of narrative, which is
the situational transformation of meaning (or the denial of meaning).
Under these circumstances, the character, even if it is not self-present
and is portrayed in its “radical excentricity to itself” (Lacan 1977,
171); i.e., even if it has no essence, it still has always its function,
like the other elements of space, time, action/event. Function is
stressed by structuralist criticism that transgresses the identity-
principle towards an effectual negation of the self. For the
structuralists, essence, like mimesis, is a mere convention, an illusion
in view of the mental constructedness and linguistic generation of
character. They describe and analyze narrative in terms of relations
and oppositions, of deep structure and surface structure (Greimas,
Barthes, Todorov, and others). In the deep structure, according to
Greimas’s narratological models, there are no characters but only
analytical abstractions, “actants”, narrative functions, which have
modal roles. They perform strategic functions in the plot as sender,
receiver, subject or object, helper or opponent, partly in analogy to
440 From Modernism to Postmodernism

the linguistic relation subject-verb-object.116 By the distribution of


thematic roles, the actants are transformed into actors in the surface
structure of the individual text. This concept of character that more or
less exclusively emphasizes action does not pay attention to mental
activity, reflection, emotion, and introspection, and leaves out
temporal aspects like development and surprise. It is again a
“spatial” concept working with fixed positions and relations. In a
further move, Roland Barthes revises his viewpoint and remarks that
for a theory of narration a system that orients itself exclusively by the
plot is not satisfactory, and he suggests in an analysis of Balzac’s
“Sarrasine” a “semic” code composed of “qualities” for the definition
of character.
Either way, what remains is a reduced and abstracted
character, a skeletted subject, a subject that does not grow “or-
ganically” into a round self but is the static product of montage,
serving outside functions. Culler remarks that “character is the major
aspect of the novel to which structuralism has paid least attention and
has been least successful in treating” (1976, 230), and Barthes notes
that the character in all structuralist models behaves itself more like a
participant than as an “essence”. Depth is replaced by depthlessness.
When with the structuralist model, deep and surface levels of
character become separable, and when the deep view finally is
discredited, the montage-principle can do two things. It can play with
the surface-depth dichotomy, for, even if the depth view is no longer
validated, it always remains a given, an anthropological constant, a
valid idea also “under erasure”. Or montage can concentrate on the
surface and create out of fragments a performing subject; or montage
can do both. That is what Barthelme does in Snow White, where he
makes use of the opposition between the traditional/heroic and
modern psychological depth views but concentrates on the new
depthlessness and employs irony, play, parody and the comic mode
for manipulation of all positions. He combines the new psychological
uncertainty and the new depthlessness into a strategy of playful
deconstruction. When the heroine’s emotions and thoughts are
revealed to the dwarfs or the reader, they are mystified or disjointed
and fragmented to such an extent that they make no sense (31, 165-
66), in fact appear as mere surface, under which, however, a hidden
depth looms. Popular psychological models are introduced to explore
and explain the unknown depth of her personality, yet they are only
Character 441

used to be satirized. Punctiliously speaking of “The Psychology of


Snow White”, the narrator muses:

What does she hope for? ‘Someday my prince will come.’ By this Snow
White means that she lives her own being as incomplete, pending the
arrival of one who will ‘complete’ her. That is, she lives her own being as
‘not-with’ [...] The incompleteness is an ache capable of subduing all other
data presented by consciousness. I don’t go along with those theories of
historical necessity, which suggest that her actions are dictated by ‘forces’
outside of the individual. That doesn’t sound reasonable, in this case (70).

Playing with the traditional character-concepts, the montage-


principle can also exclusively concentrate on the surface and still use
as horizon the more complicated views of character. The mode of
composition in the extreme case of montage is the list, the list of
unrelated items that do not interrelate to form a coherent character.
This kind of list makes use of the notion that the character is just the
collector, the meeting point of qualities, actions, and situations but
parodies this idea at the same time by radicalizing the incongruity of
the listed details. It thus both uses and ironizes the psychological
practice of collecting qualities, habits, deeds, and achievements in
order to define the (in fact indefinable) individuality of a character,
its uniqueness and depth core. In Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew, the
writer Lamont quotes from his short story “O’Mara of No Fixed
Abode”. He refers to “the kernel, the nucleus”, i.e., the characteri-
zation of the protagonist O’Mara. It is a long list of what O’Mara
likes and dislikes, running over more than nine pages in a parodic
style, dispersing, disseminating, and fragmenting any kind of sense in
a combination of structuralist and poststructuralist viewpoints.
Language’s additive composition, the lists of incoherent,
incongruent, irrelevant details, together with the disruption of syntax,
overwhelm the targeted subject, which disappears in mere verbiage:

He was wont to have an accident over a girl that men’s forget, lingering
awhile, being on the mall and swingin’ down the lane, wild flowers,
Charley his boy, fascinating rhythm, a June night, his best girl, his dream
girl, his Katharina, a lonesome babe lost in the wood, the winks of a angel,
a rhapsody in blue, a serenade post-orangeade, tea for two, a love that’s
true always, a cuppa coffee (jive java, Jim!), a sangwich and her, Dinah,
drifting and dreaming, a Swiss miss who missed him, sitting on top of the
world, and moonlight and roses (67).
442 From Modernism to Postmodernism

Based on the uncertainty of the self about itself that we


discussed above, the montage-principle can add time to the surface-
view and/or arrange a simultaneity of surface possibilities in its
creation of character. The result is the multiplication of the self. For
Foucault and Deleuze, the answer to the question of “[w]ho speaks
and acts?” is: “It is always a multiplicity, even within the person who
speaks and acts” (Foucault and Deleuze 206). Character is in fact
understood as a manifold virtuality out of which emerges the singular
actuality, which is always in motion. Already in 1931, Beckett spoke
of Proust’s “perpetual exfoliation of personality” (13). Barth notes in
a statement: “I’ve always been impressed by the multiplicity of
people that one has in one [...] I’ve never been impressed by any
unity of identity in myself” (Prince 56). Sukenick emphasizes the
fact “that you are amorphous; you are just a locus of consciousness
and operating possibly on one possible ego structure. And when you
see that there are all sorts of possibilities”. And he adds: “Now for
me the liberating thing is to choose not from the social or from some
catalog but to allow all the possibilities in your personality” (Bellamy
1974, 63-64). Multiplicity creates new possibilities even out of that
which has seemingly been exhausted. The relation and the tensions
between virtuality and actuality of character intensify the problem of
representation, of representation of the subject, and more so of the
self, and infers the impossibility of representing the multiplied
character as a stable, coherent entity.
The character, which is placed between worlds and
multiplied, is almost always off center and leaves gaps; it is
mystified, is clichéd and ironized, or is simply given up. This kind of
non-characterization of characters ends up foregrounding the
situation. Having lost its anthropocentrism, the situation para-
doxically becomes itself a decentered “center” that deconstructs and
reconstructs itself and its constituents in an infinite number of
transformations. Ronald Sukenick has noted that, “as the field
becomes organized, the shaping influence of personality, and of any
other single element, becomes less and less until finally it is the
structured field itself that becomes the organizing power, shaping
personality, shaping energy, shaping language, culture, literary
tradition” (1985, 14). In this process of organizing “the structured
field” of the situation, the montage-principle does not, however, stop
at the multiplication of selves. Once the force of character and
Character 443

situation are balanced, or once the situation gains dominance and the
character reduced to a mere functionary, the mental activities of the
character can also be isolated and combined at will. The dissolution
of the psychological and the narratological deep structure, the
decenterment of character, and the emphasis on function instead of
essence enforce, in a further step, the concentration on the characters’
function in creating the world. This means that the character’s
faculties or mental activities are foregrounded and used for relating
to the world, or, conversely, on the perceptive modes that determine
the world as it is created, quite independent of a unified character as
form, as individual source or cause. The narrated situation then
becomes the playing-field for the manifold forces of perception,
desire, feeling, thinking and acting. Sukenick says: “The whole
consciousness breaks up into parts, and various energies can begin to
flow because of that polarizing among the parts. The fragmentation
can then alter the parts, or the parts can be combined into different
ways. [...] that willful fragmentation of the ongoing narrative — or of
the ongoing experience of a given consciousness in the process of
composition — creates energy, creates detail. [...] You begin to
realize that the process of characterization is the process of
fragmentation and dialectic that the mind ordinarily pursues”
(LeClair and McCaffery 295). This fragmentation allows for a
dissociation of character and consciousness, of character and action
(while critics like Harvey or Walcutt see character and action as
moral unity), and character and experience, without, however, giving
fully up the idea of a centered, unique, self-reflexive character that
looms behind, behind, for instance, the character-reified-to-voice,
Menelaus, in Barth’s “Menelaiad”, not to speak of Beckett’s
Unnamable, the prototype of postmodern reductions of character,
whose existentialism, however, is more ironized, comicalized, and
played with in postmodern fiction than Beckett probably would have
approved of.

7.4. Poststructuralism, the Deconstruction of the Subject, and the


Introduction of Time

The structuralist approach models itself on linguistics and


turns against the individual character (which is expropriated and
replaced as origin of fictional character by language and narrative
444 From Modernism to Postmodernism

text), as well as against the theory of representation in favor of the


“true text”, the “formal truth” (Ricardou),117 but it retains in narrative
a skeletted subject as point of reference or label for the collection of
actions or qualities. The poststructuralist approach (of writers like
Derrida, Lacan, Foucault) further deconstructs the subject, which
structuralism had kept intact at least as idea, by emphasizing social
sign-systems, language, and simply the process of change. The
deductive, fixed (“spatial”) structure of character and the subject as
integrative instance are replaced by the inductive, unfixed, temporal,
and infinite process that is perpetually in construction,
deconstruction, and reconstruction, is contradictory, open to change,
and adverse to any kind of closure (which the idea of a
psychologically centered character and of a narrative deep structure
of character would suggest). Lacan has said: “a signifier is that which
represents a subject for another signifier. [...] The consequence is the
fading of the subject” (1981, 207-08). The consequence of the
rejection of all kinds of totalizations in favor of multiplicity, change
and continuously new configurations of the human is that the
character can no longer be represented as centered. In Foucault’s
words: “Representation no longer exists; there’s only action —
theoretical action and practical action which serve as relays and form
networks” (Foucault and Deleuze 206-07). This is not quite a new
development. Nietzsche already wrote: “there is no ‘being’ behind
doing, effecting, becoming: the ‘doer’ is merely a fiction added to the
deed — the deed is everything” (1967, 45). The “one possible ego
structure”, of which Sukenick speaks in the quotation cited above,
and in which all ego versions originate and connect, can be given up
in favor of a mere serial succession of character versions that may
change, metamorphose, alter their age and gender without inter-
relation or recognizable reference to a recognizable and “probable”
common self. Available are now two strategies of decenterment: (1)
a multiplication of egos without the necessity of a narrative
interrelation of the various versions in one unique self; and (2) a
fragmentation and remontage of fragments of one self. The two
strategies connect, and postmodern writers take account of them in
various forms and combinations.
Yet if there is no centered character left, then there is need at
least for a subject. Without a (formal) subject, the narrated situation
does not function. Character is one of its constituents, even when it is
Character 445

deconstructed; it so to speak reconstructs itself automatically. But it


can reconstruct itself under the dominance of form or force.
Postmodern fiction, and the postmodern theories that accompany and
influence it, of course emphasize force, force as a secondary
phenomenon, resisting power, or force as a primary phenomenon
relativizing all categorical restrictions. Foucault’s elaboration of his
position may here serve as a guide-line, because he deconstructs and
reconstructs the subject, sets it in a field of functions defined within a
system of power and resistance basic to postmodern fiction.118 The
Foucauldian subject is dispersed:

To the various statuses, the various sites, the various positions that he can
occupy or be given when making a discourse. To the discontinuity of the
planes from which he speaks. And if these planes are linked by a system of
relations, this system is not established by the synthetic activity of a
consciousness identical with itself, dumb and anterior to all speech, but by
the specificity of a discursive practice [...] thus conceived, discourse is not
the majestically unfolding manifestation of a thinking, knowing, speaking
subject, but, on the contrary, a totality, in which the dispersion of the
subject and his discontinuity with himself may be determined. It is a space
of exteriority, in which a network of distinct sites is deployed (1972, 54-
55).

Yet this is not all. In “What is an Author?” Foucault sees the subject
as a “function of discourse”; he assigns it the role of a necessary,
though de-essentialized frame of reference:

The subject should not be entirely abandoned. It should be reconsidered


not to restore the theme of an originating subject, but to seize its functions,
its interventions in discourse, and its system of dependencies [...] We
should ask: under what conditions and through what forms can an entity
like the subject appear in the order of discourse; what position does it
occupy; what functions does it exhibit; and what rules does it follow in
each type of discourse? In short, the subject (and its substitutes) must be
stripped of its creative role and analyzed as a complex and variable
function of discourse (137-38).

And a further point must be made. If the text is a network of power,


its “abstract machine”, there must be subjects that exercise, and
others that suffer this power; indeed, “one doesn’t have here a power
which is wholly in the hands of one person who can exercise it alone
and totally over the others. It’s a machine in which everyone is
caught, those who exercise power just as much as those over whom it
446 From Modernism to Postmodernism

is exercised” (Foucault 1980, 156). Power always calls up resistance.


Actually, power could not exist without resistance; it is defined by its
counterpart, resistance. Therefore, in spite of his conception of power
as an “abstract machine”, to which everybody is subjected, Foucault
sees and advocates strategies of resistance, which, of course, let the
character, as a kind of self, back in through the backdoor. His advice
to the de-individualized, yet still resisting character is:
Develop action, thought and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and
disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization.
Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit,
castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thought has so long held sacred as
a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and
multiple differences over uniformity, flows over unity, mobile
arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not
sedentary but nomadic [...]
Do not demand of politics that it restore the “rights” of the
individual, as philosophy defined them. The individual is the product of
power. What is needed is to “de-individualize” by means of multiplication
and displacement, diverse combination. The groups must not be the
organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generator of
“de-individualization” (1977, xiii-xiv).

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in The Anti-Oedipus take


an alternative course, making resistance not a secondary
phenomenon, a response to the power games of the “abstract
machine”, but, following and deconstructing Freud, consider it a
primary force that relativizes, and rebels against, the social system
and its repressive tendency. They place this power of resistance, or
rather, deconstruction, in the primordial, nomadic and mechanistic
flux of desire propelled by an “energy-machine” (1), which,
however, is coded and territorialized by capitalism. De-territorialized
desire, following the “lines of flight”, in a process of “becoming”,
towards unknown, experimental states, deconstructs the repressive
fixities and inhibitions of the self, the self-identical ego, and disrupts
social formations and bourgeois order and their “semiotic regimes”,
with which it is in continuous, conflictual tension. Arguing in an
ironic turn from the social viewpoint of order and defining the basic,
uninhibited, primordial flux of deconstructive desire as “illness”, the
authors call the subject (“with no fixed identity”) that resists the
normative but artificial claims of society a “schizo”, who is, so to
speak, pure, deterritorialized force, as much as that is possible.
Character 447

As for the Schizo, continually wandering about, migrating here, there, and
everywhere as best he can, he plunges further and further into the realm of
deterritorialization, reaching the furthest limits of the decomposition of the
socius on the surface of his own body without organs (35).

In a reversal of anthropocentric thought, the ego does not


take center place but rather the “desiring machines” and “energy
machines” do. Any assemblage of incongruence and heterogeneity
makes desire and energy flow, and dissolves the systems of
repression that support, for their own restrictive purposes, the idea, or
rather illusion, of an individual, self-controlled subject. Deleuze and
Guattari differ from Foucault in the answer to the question of
whether stratified power or unstratified desires is primary. They
themselves comment on their difference to Foucault, noting that
contrary to the latter, “(1) to us the assemblages seem fundamentally
to be assemblages not of power but of desire (desire is always
assembled), and power seems to be a stratified dimension of the
assemblage; (2) the diagram and abstract machine have lines of flight
that are primary, which are not phenomena of resistance or
counterattack in an assemblage, but cutting edges of creation and
deterritorialization” (Plateaus, 1993, 531). These two concepts —
Foucault’s and Deleuze/ Guattari’s — stake out the range of
possibilities on a scale that allows for many transitions and
conflictual oppositions but leaves the subject in a tenuous position. It
is needed and dissolved: needed as a site where the forces of power,
desire and discourse meet, dissolved as source and cause of what is
generated in the text. Ideas of character outside the text are no longer
accepted as the source of character-figurations within the text, and
the subject in the text is no longer the source of language, of its
system and textual performance. They are, on the contrary, the bonds
that shape the character. If one takes the radical linguistic position to
its extreme, which only few postmodern writers do in practice,
though for provocative purposes they may talk differently in theory,
then subject and subjectivity merge in the subjectivity of the
discourse and its linguistic form as syntagma of signifiers that have
no reference beyond language and find their frame of reference alone
in the linguistic system (Genette 1993, 63).
Postmodern writers have taken up the poststructuralist
deconstructive ideas that in many ways form the ideology of
postmodernism and its culture of difference, immanence, and multi-
448 From Modernism to Postmodernism

plicity, of indefiniteness and mobility of being, and the heterogeneity


of the “performing self”, to quote the title of Richard Poirier’s book.
The following statements of postmodern writers show that they speak
in unison though with interesting variations, often in a mixture of
structuralist “spatial” and poststructuralist “temporal” positions,
which both neglect or deny individuality as central aspect of
character. Borges in an interview of 1971 says: “I’m afraid there are
no characters in my work. I’m afraid I’m the only character”
(Newman and Kinzie, Borges, 399). Robbe-Grillet, just as Borges,
writes in general terms: “the novel of characters belongs entirely to
the past, it describes a period; that which marked the apogee of the
individual”; yet “the old myths of ‘depth’” (1966, 28, 23) have
become useless for describing the current human condition. Later
postmodern writers elaborate their position(s) in deconstructionist
terms. Sukenick declares in an interview that “[m]y drive is to
dissolve character. I think that that’s not only a need on my part, but I
presume to think that’s also a cultural need for a lot of people, for the
culture in general perhaps” (Bellamy 1974, 64). He calls the
characters’ names the only stable elements, which, however, serve
merely as “rubrics for totally disparate traits” (Bellamy 1972b, 65).
And he writes in In Form: Digressions on the Act of Fiction: “My
characters have some very basic minimal identity, but beyond that
the changes they go through are enormous, even contradictory. I
prefer the characters to be as little consistent with themselves as they
can be, so that everything but that tiny, perhaps genetic, trace of
identity is cancelled out” (133). The evanescent characters in his
novel Out disintegrate, transform, and metamorphose into one
another. Age and relationships are perpetually open to change, bound
to movement, to the flight from stasis. Sukenick writes in Out: “I
want to write a book like a cloud that changes as it goes” (136),
which directly relates to the composition of character. Federman
utters a similar opinion: “the people of fiction, the fictitious beings,
will also no longer be well-made characters who carry with them a
filed identity, a stable set of social and psychological attributes [...]
The creatures of the new fiction will be as changeable, as illusory, as
nameless, as unnamable as fraudulent, as unpredictable as the
discourse that makes them up [...] That creature will be, in a sense,
present to his own making, present to his own absence” (1975, 12-
13). In Take It or Leave It, he writes: “I want to tell a story that
Character 449

cancels itself as it goes” (n.p.); and it cancels with the story of course
the characters. The character participates in the fiction only as a
“grammatological being” (1975, 13). Gass notes, referring to Mr.
Cashmore in Henry James’s The Awkward Age, that a character is
“mostly empty canvas”, a “verbal body”, is “(1) a noise, (2) a proper
name, (3) a complex system of ideas, (4) a controlling conception,
(5) an instrument of verbal organization, (6) a pretended mode of
referring, and (7) a source of verbal energy”. He adds: “Mr.
Cashmore is not a person. He is not an object of perception, and
nothing whatever that is appropriate to persons can be correctly said
of him” (1970, 45, 44).119 For Gass’s language-is-the-world concept,
“there are two kinds of characters: characters as sources from which
the language comes, and aims or ends towards which the language
flows. Sometimes they turn out to be the same” (Ziegler and Bigsby
155). If the fictional character is merely a “verbal body” — a
“linguistic location in a book toward which a great part of the rest of
the text stands as a modifier. Just as the subject of a sentence, say, is
modified by the predicate” (LeClair and McCaffery 28)— it only
follows that Gass in Willie Master’s Lonesome Wife imagines as
protagonist a Lady Language in person who creates herself with a
wide variety of styles, fearing nothing more than what she calls “the
terror of terminology” (n.p., blue section). The effect is that “the
lonesome self [is] losing and recreating itself in language, the
prisonhouse turning itself into the playhouse before our very eyes”
(Tanner 1975, 121).
It is obvious that the postmodern writers in the wake of both
structuralism and poststructuralism recur to the “natural” frame of
fiction and its elements of time and space, for new paradigms, in the
attempt to define or rather de-define character. As mentioned,
structuralism fixes characters as “spatial” positions for the collection
and distribution of actions and qualities; poststructuralism dissolves
character in a temporal process. It is this temporal feature that
ultimately wins out in the self-understanding of postmodern fiction.
One of the reasons for this development is that time is change,
dissolution of the old and constitution of the new, a continuous
deferral of the end, of closure, and that it is renewing force in
contrast to stabilizing order and form; the support of energy and
movement makes sense, since the “effort at control is hopeless”
anyway (LeClair and McCaffery 287). The advantage of the process
450 From Modernism to Postmodernism

of force in time furthermore has an advantage over stability and


center in “space” in that it can be interpreted in various ways, on
different levels, and as a move of crosscurrents, not only sequentially
as change. It can be understood in musical terms as rhythm, or in
linguistic terms as discourse, for which character is the transit
station. Among postmodern writers, Peter Currie sees — in terms of
Foucault — “a recognition of subjectivity as the trace of plural and
intersecting discourses, of non-unified, contradictory ideologies, the
product of a relational system which is finally that of discourse
itself” (64); Hans Bertens interprets the character’s discontinuity and
contingency (in a Derridean sense) as the arbitrary replacement “at
any time” of one discourse “by another type of discourse”, so that
“discourses seem to be floating into and out of certain fictional
structures that are endowed with proper names” (1988a, 148-49).
Whether one retains the notion of character or not, the concepts of
order, uniqueness, and wholeness are dissolved in favor of dynamis
and change. The psychic force appears as desire, privileged by
Deleuze and Guattari (and discussed later), or as consciousness,
which includes the flow of experience, self-consciousness, and
language, or as specified or unspecified voice, voice as “freedom of
the language”, as that which “differs”, which “has to do with flows
and desires, not with meaning”, and belongs to “signification
nascent, floating”. It is a performance of consciousness, yet of course
within the “system of signifiers” (Durand 1997, 100-01). Sukenick
speaks of consciousness:

What goes on beneath the ordinary idea of characterization — having


characters interact and conflict within a fictional world — is really not
very unlike the ordinary process of the mind in any inquiry about anything.
In this case, instead of the entities being concepts, ideas, symbols, points
of view, they are called Frank, Mary, and Larry. In both cases, the entities
involved combine, recombine, split up. [...] More and more as the idea of
imitation drops away, the necessity of having these entities under the label
of hard-and-fast, well-rounded characters also drops away (LeClair and
McCaffery 295).

Federman again emphasizes (the flow of) consciousness: “In


a number of recent novels it seems that the consciousness is
becoming more prominent, while the self is gradually diminishing”
(LeClair and McCaffery 140-41). We “are going to have much more
consciousness, much more reflexiveness (in the sense of thinking),
Character 451

much more awareness in the novel” (141). However, he varies the


viewpoints and the terms he uses. In addition to consciousness,
Federman speaks of discourse and rhythm (“I am looking for [...] the
rhythm of the entire book” [129]), or of voice.
In his interview with Federman, McCaffery notes: “In all of
your fiction — but especially in The Voice in the Closet — you
deliberately blur the usual distinctions between narrator, author, and
voice”, and he attributes this tendency to “a great deal of postmodern
fiction: the works of Sukenick, Gass, Katz, Barth, even Vonnegut”
(135- 36). Voice becomes one the most inclusive terms for the
textual process because it “speaks of the body: of its dualities
(interior/exterior, front/ back, eye/ear, etc.). It speaks of the
unconscious drives and fantasies” (Durand 1997, 101). It is thus an
expression of force, comprising the “voices” of author, character and
language in one uncontrollable intentionality. Its incomprehensibility
in terms of order and form places it beyond all-too rational control
and gives it multi-dimensionality (Sukenick: “I don’t think the model
is now control” [287]). Federman confirms McCaffery’s assumption
that the “narrative voice” in The Voice in the Closet “is not really you
so much, or a ‘character’ in the usual sense, but is actually the voice
of all your earlier fiction”. In Federman’s words: “Exactly. It’s the
voice of fiction, the voice of all of Federman’s fiction — everything
in our lives is fiction, as I mentioned earlier” (146); and he adds later
that, beginning a novel, “I have no idea where I’m going. No idea
whatsoever. Otherwise what would be the point of writing?” (131).
The voice of fiction takes hold of itself. It is a view that Sukenick
shares, at least for a time.
With the negation of the reference to the extra-linguistic
world, and the rejection of the distinctive individuality of the
character in the text, with its replacement by the subject, and the
replacement of the subject by desire, subjectivity, and consciousness,
by voice, language and its signifiers, the other extreme has been
reached, and one might wonder if the intention is not “to chase away
the ‘ideology of representation’ only to replace it with what could be
called an idealism of the signifier” (Carroll 1982, 18). The
consequence of an understanding of fiction as mere force, as tem-
poral flow (of consciousness, narrative voice, or language) without
form is finally that “[as] a matter of fact, there is then no longer even
a narrator. [...] No one speaks here; the events seem to narrate
452 From Modernism to Postmodernism

themselves” (Benveniste, Problems 208), which of course goes


against the grain of narrative. Modernism’s “stream-of-con-
sciousness” ideology has here been carried to its limit; the idea of the
stream is radicalized to the detriment of the subject. If we look for a
term that incorporates most aspects of the dissolution of the self and
of its substitute, the subject, and thus includes the different
(traditional, modernist, structuralist and poststructuralist) versions of
character, one of the best choices might be the term subjectivity or
“subjective presence”. It indicates the subject as focal point, the
subject as author, character or text, and its voice, the performance in
time of mental activities, and the uncategorizability of that activity,
as well as the shifting temporality of the particular and distinctive
textual process. Charles Russell gives a comprehensive summary.
We recognize “on both the formal and thematic levels [...] the
problematic nature of subjective presence — whether conceived in
terms of character, writer or the speaking voice of the text — a
subjectivity which rarely achieves clear definition or stable identity.
Personal presence discovers itself as fundamentally in flux, as a
process or transitory locus of shifting, disparate and incompletely
known events, forces, concepts and systems, over which it has little
control and which it can at most investigate and strive to pattern by a
constant self-reflexive critique and creation” (1980, 30).
If force and its various representations become dominant in
postmodern fiction, there are also counter-movements seeking a new
balance between force and form. Interestingly enough, though
Sukenick used to employ the term “improvisation” for his narrative
method, he came to feel a lack of structure and then complemented
the idea of improvisation with the necessity of having form (“I
needed a formal structure” [LeClair and McCaffery 291]). The
reason is that improvisation by now has also become a worn-out
formula, a cliché. Elkin follows suit: “If a book has nothing but those
spontaneous generations, the result will not be melodrama but
chaos”. And he adds: “As a matter of fact I am concerned with
structure and form and my novels are structured and formed”
(LeClair and McCaffery 116, 113). Barth says: “I worry myself sick.
I take the structure pretty seriously” (Dembo and Pondrom 22), and
he calls himself “passionately formal” (LeClair and McCaffery 17).
Coover emphasizes the “formal design” of his The Origin of the
Brunists and the “design, the structure [...] so self-revealing” in The
Character 453

Universal Baseball Association (LeClair and McCaffery 71), and he


speaks of his “delight with the rich ironic possibilities that the use of
structure affords” (Gado 148). Federman notes that though he does
not write plots, he seeks in the “sentence” he begins his book with
and the central image “the structure, the rhythm of the entire book”, a
strategy that leads to symbolism and makes a book like The Twofold
Vibration “rigidly structured” (LeClair and McCaffery 129).
Hawkes, as Barth (and the others), wants to have it both ways: “my
own writing process involves a constant effort to shape and control
my materials as well as an effort to liberate fictional energy” (Dembo
and Pondrom 10). Gass gives an idea of what this new form is like. It
is the force of simultaneity, of possibility: “Rigor is achieved by
pushing things very hard and trying to uncover every possible
ramification, nuance, and aspect, and then ordering those things very,
very carefully” (LeClair and McCaffery 157). What Gass appreciates
in Barth is “energy and total control”; and he finds in Hawkes, Elkin,
Gaddis, Barthelme, not to speak of Beckett and Borges, “[c]ontrol
again” (LeClair and McCaffery 173-74). Form can be elicited from
the flow of narrative, and it can be imposed on it (which may be the
same thing, since form is a human construct, a case for montage,
anyway). Sukenick claims for Federman, Abish, Calvino, and him-
self: “you simply impose a form on your materials, it not really
mattering how this form was generated [...] the important idea is that
the genesis of form isn’t important, whether it’s traditional or
untraditional. The important thing is to have a form” (LeClair and
McCaffery 291).
What these utterances demonstrate is the strained,
contingent, and yet necessary and variable, interrelation between
force and form in narratives as well as in character; they indicate that
character is always placed between force and form, also postmodern
character. The “new paradigms” of characterization that, Sukenick
says, “the new circumstances [...] demand” (LeClair and McCaffery
287) are obviously meant to emphasize force, textuality, and
discourse. But they have their source in human constants, desire and
consciousness, and manifest themselves in forms and patterns of
perception and reflection, behavior and action, of conflict and
struggle, winning and losing, joy and despair, which create the
doubleness of character we spoke of before, the doubleness of, and
tension between, textuality and referentiality. The stream of
454 From Modernism to Postmodernism

discourse, of consciousness and voice, the “subjective presence” are


directed to, or originate from, and indeed are split up into, mani-
festations of agents, and the agents again are split up into the inner
and the outer, the inner again into contrasting convictions, feelings,
reflections, and doings, the outer into places, things and other people.
This creates difference, not only “différance” (Derrida), i.e., deferral
and dissemination of signification, and constitutes the stable,
situational condition of narrative in all instability and fluidity. And
the stable, situational condition of fiction is also the precondition for
the meeting and interaction of the intratextual and the extratextual
dimensions in the work of art.
The tension between the textual and the extratextual is
repeated within the narrated situation in the strain between the actual
and the possible. The character is constitutionally mobile and moves
in the text between the various levels of narrative, is potentially
everything, referential and nonreferential, arrested in its being, but
also “fluid” and multiple, definable as function and indefinable as
being. This is the point where the poststructuralist positions,
accentuating mobility, textual fluidity and unstructurable flow,
connect with the new psychological uncertainty that recognizes the
opacity and unknowability of the self, not only to others but also to
the own self. We ask, in Foucault’s terms, “under what conditions
and through what forms [...] an entity like the subject [can] appear in
the order of discourse” and “what position does it occupy; what
functions does it exhibit” (1976, 243). Gilbert Sorrentino’s novel
Mulligan Stew is a pertinent text for demonstrating how play, irony,
and the comic mode make use of various models of character and the
tensions between them. Mulligan Stew is more radical than most
other experimental narratives in making the subject a fluid entity and
the result of discourse, a word figure, while at the same time
equipping the character with all the properties of an extratextual
being that, however, never can leave its textual confinement.
Character 455

7.5. Gilbert Sorrentino, Mulligan Stew: The Connection and


Clash of Character Concepts

Mulligan Stew dramatizes the (insurmountable) tension


between the self-creating force of the text and the control of the
author, between the author and the “They” system that controls him,
as well as the tension between the textuality and the referentiality of
the fictional characters within the written text. The writer/-
protagonist, Tony Lamont, who is working on a new novel,
tentatively called Guinea Red, leaves his fictional characters the
freedom to claim an existence outside the novel and to discuss their
roles within the text. They complain about Lamont’s bad writing,
which they are horrified by and wish to escape from, but which they
have to succumb to since they are slaves to the written word
whenever Lamont is working on them. In Halpin’s, one of his
character’s, words: “Were there a God I would beg Him to tell me
why he allowed this scribbler, this unbearably pretentious hack,
Anthony Lamont, to place me in this ridiculous position” (25). Since
Lamont, however, loves flashbacks, he “loses control over our
‘present’ substances, re-creating us, as he does, in the past” (150).
Left alone in the present and without defined physical appearance,
“since he [Lamont] never bothered to describe us” (151), the
characters even decide to deceive their author by exchanging roles.
Lamont on the other hand, is himself at times overwhelmed by the
force of the written words. He feels out of control: “I don’t even
know where the title came from. Let alone anything else! There is no
way for me to judge this [...] I don’t think I am in control here. I
didn’t want this to be Daisy” (246-47). He doubts his own
independence, his self-determination as an author, fearing that “as I
have created Halpin — such as he, my God, is — somebody has
created me” (247). He has “begun to feel like a character myself”
(257). When his paranoia drives him to madness, he thinks that
“they” have plotted against him all the while. Just as character
(Halpin) and text are alienated from one another, the controlling
author and the self-creating text are disengaged, leaving Lamont in a
paranoiac state, terrified of the coercions of a “they” system that he
sees at work behind the manipulative extravagances of the text.

There on the desk, this chapter! Completely written, typed. I read with
rising fear, terror.
456 From Modernism to Postmodernism

I did not write this chapter.

Typed on my machine. My paper. No notes, no rough drafts, no


corrections. A perfect, finished copy.
They of course have done it.

They think I don’t know them! Subtle, and insane plot, hatched
so long ago (400).

And “they” have, of course, written his “[s]habby filthy prose” (400).
And Halpin, the character and narrator produced by Lamont, also
comes to think that he is being written by somebody else. The text
foregrounds the act and process of writing and the textuality of
characters. It creates a medley and puzzle of pieces and perspectives,
of characters that move inside and outside the novel in progress
(which, as the novel within the novel, is in fact the novel), of literary
parodies, satirical attacks against all participants in the publishing
business, of lists of incoherent items, names, gifts, birth dates, events,
in short, of a confusing multiplicity of frames, planes, and
dimensions of signification. It is a literary game that demonstrates
how language, having become autonomous, contends with writer and
narrator and character, takes over the role and the generating power
of the text — but, of course, being a narrative discourse, it cannot
and does not wish to abolish character and narrator(s) nor the
psychological code and the idea of an autonomous self (cf. the
insipient madness of Lamont). Indeed, the opposition and
interrelation of word and being open quite new horizons for the
imagination. Opening these new horizons, the fictional situation
develops four competing, interrelating narrative dimensions that
heighten the complexity of the text that again heightens the narrative
play-factor, or vice versa: (1) language (“They”), then (2) characters:
first Halpin and Beaumont (in Lamont’s book) then Halpin,
Beaumont and Lamont (all three as character in Sorrentino’s book);
(3) the relation between character (Halpin) and author (Lamont)
within another author’s, Sorrentino’s, text; and (4) Halpin, Lamont
and an anonymous character as competing narrators. All four levels
are related to one another by the game of power and resistance that
determines all the narrated levels and situations and allows their
combination and exchange.
Character 457

All planes are ontologically different. Yet as fictions upon


fictions all levels function in terms of character and situation. One
plane is the basic narrated situation, always present and always
changing. The others are imposed upon this situation. They create
meta-situations above the ground-level of the narrated character and
situation, a procedure by which the narrated situation increases both
its dependence and independence. In this process not only are the
interrelations/oppositions of situation and character experimented
with in the spirit of irony and play, but the dualism of character and
situation is also extended, for purposes of further complication, into
the quadrangle of character, situation, author, and discourse. All four
become independent players in the game of construction and
deconstruction, and their varying interaction serves the postmodern
maxim of multiplication and multiperspectivism. It is quite obvious
that when discourse multiplies its planes, characters and situations do
not disappear but also multiply, though on different (ontological)
levels. In fact, whatever the playing-field, without characters and the
various concepts of character (textual, functional, essential), without
their interrelation and contradiction, the text obviously could do
nothing, would be mere verbiage.

7.6. Reader Response

Of course, the reader cannot be left out of consideration in a


study of character in postmodern fiction. In the communication-
model text, the reader and his or her expectations, notions, desires,
play an important part. If, as Barthes holds, the goal of the literary
text “is to make the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of
the text” (1974), because only the recipient’s participation in the
creative process can guarantee against boredom, then the reader’s
creative participation is also called for in the creation of character.
Thomas Docherty even argues that the character of postmodern
fiction is not situated in the text but in the reader (see 1983, 8). Being
part of the process of signification, the recipients of the text read the
produced character in its dual nature as sign, as signifier linked to
other signifiers, and as a signified, linked to the world; and they
interpret character not only according to the specific textual and
cultural codes embedded in the narrative but also those of their own
worlds, which include ideas of character, identity, wholeness. And
458 From Modernism to Postmodernism

even though the reader might live “in a delightful culture of


irrationality” (Federman, in LeClair and McCaffery 138), he or she
needs a frame of reference for the understanding of fiction, and this
frame is provided, as argued above, by the situational constitution of
fiction and the sequence of situations, or what Shlomith Rimmon-
Kenan, distinguishing text and story, has called the “story” (which is
made up of situations): “in the text, characters are inextricable from
the rest of the design, whereas in the story they are extracted [by the
reader] from their textuality” (1986,33). Since the semiotic systems
are doubly articulated into forms of expression and forms of content,
the character is indeed, in Eco’s words (borrowing the terms from
Hjelmslev), “an element of an expression plane conventionally
related to one (or several) elements of a content plane” (1979, 48),
and the content plane includes or calls up in the reader psychological,
social and moral codes.120
The reader’s role has not only something to do with his or
her sense of “reality”, for the reader’s concept of character is a
construct of the mind anyway, and it is a construct in multiple ways
and for multiple reasons. The reader’s image of character has always
been a blending of “reality” and fiction, either because of the
presuppositions he or she holds or because of the ultimate
unknowability of people and oneself. The cherished prejudices of the
reader are related to the traditional, culturally enforced,
anthropocentric ideas of character, its uniqueness and centeredness,
which are strengthened by the presuppositions and clichés offered by
the media. The latter may have dissolved the difference between the
real and the unreal by no longer presenting and judging the character
according to the standards of “reality” and probability but rather
according to the rules of the spectacle to which they pay homage, yet
they obey the anthropocentric image of character since they serve the
purpose of evasion. As Cohen and Taylor write: “All around us — on
advertisement boardings, bookshelves, record covers, television
screens — these miniature escape fantasies present themselves. This,
it seems, is how we are destined to live, as split personalities in
which the private life is disturbed by the promise of escape routes to
another reality” (139). These escape routes to another reality — be
they banal and fed by TV series, or be they nostalgic and reactivate
humanistic ideas of self-centeredness, self-reliance, and self-
responsibility — have in common that they raise the image of a
Character 459

“round” character. And this is exactly what the postmodern writer


knows, reckons with in his or her fiction, and supposedly wants to
change by destabilizing any fixed and centered idea of the world. The
author of course cannot change or eliminate the illusion that the
character is self-determined and psychologically coherent. Despite
being illusionary, this character-concept has become one of the
foundational ideas of Western civilization and thus has a “reality” of
its own that has image-building power and that the writer even longs
for, but feels obliged to question both in the name of truth and the
liberation of the mind from stifling clichés. Even if the writer flattens
the character, he or she always speculates on the indissoluble tension
between ideas of “flatness” and “roundness”.
Summing up the argument at this point, we might say that,
since postmodern fiction harbors a multiplicity of character-notions,
these different character-models — textual, functional, essential —
are necessary for criticism, too. The multifariousness of character-
perspectives both results from and produces the spirit of play and
irony and the comic and the parodic modes, which guarantee a
flexibility of viewpoints. Narrative articulates not only one position
but several. Multiplicity is the keyword of the times. Having given
up the ideology of mimesis and interiority, the postmodern novel has
available the whole range of possibilities that have emerged in the
last two hundred years.121 No longer is any single totalizing stance the
absolutely “right” one, but there is, under the terms of possibility-
thinking and possibility-narration, an interplay of various, or rather,
of all paradigms of character, “traditional realistic [ones]” (Brooke-
Rose 1981, 366) and “selves infolding and outfolding in dazzling
perspectives, leaving the merest trace of a script” (Tatham 138). This
reference to character in all its versions is true not only for the
“hybrid” texts of Joan Didion (Democracy) and Don DeLillo, but
also for all of the texts of Elkin, Hawkes, Gass, Barth, Pynchon, and
other postmodernists. As David Carroll writes: “If the tendency in
recent fiction is for the novels themselves to expose and even assert
the linguistic-rhetorical properties around which they are supposedly
constructed, this in no way means that these novels must be read only
in terms of ‘form,’ of their ‘linguistic generation,’ or that the ‘pure
play’ of the signifier has effectively eliminated all problems of
subjectivity. The subject ‘haunts’ the signifier too, which means, that
the subject is still in question in fiction as well as theory” (1982, 26).
460 From Modernism to Postmodernism

Since the maxim of postmodernism is pluralism of codes, that must


also be the guiding principle for the understanding and the analysis
of the postmodern fictional character. The priority of approaches,
however, needs to be reversed. If formerly the concept of essence
took priority, this role has now been taken over by function and
perspective. Essence has withdrawn into one position among others,
though even “under erasure” it is always present and ready to appear
and strengthen the role of character in the narrated situation. When
McCaffery suggests to Sukenick that “your generation of writers
assumed that depth psychology, at least temporarily, didn’t need
further exploration?” he answers: “Not exactly. Contemporary fiction
still [...] has to deal with ego psychology. But it doesn’t have to focus
on it necessarily”. The “interest in ego psychology”, has changed
from “Freudian depth psychology” to what Sukenick calls “the
broadest definition of psychology — say, the psychology of the way
the mind works”. In fact, “in fiction there are a lot of other things that
underlie the creative process before ego psychology, like the whole
cognitive faculty and just how we make sense of patterns”. Indeed,
he maintains that his “approach is an investigation of the creative
power of the mind, of the imagination itself” (LeClair and McCaffery
286, 289). In the following sections, we will investigate “the creative
power of the mind, of the imagination itself” and interpret a number
of texts under the heading not of character, but its mental activities
— perception, reflection, behavior and action, emotion, desire and
belief — and demonstrate the isolationability of these sensual and
psychic activities as well as their performance in view of a more
comprehensive concept of character and the self.

7.7. Character and Situation: The Activities of Consciousness


and the Creation of Imaginary Worlds

The modes that define the relationship between character and


situation, feeling, desiring, thinking, acting, are anthropological
constants, but the specificities of the situation produce differences in
attitude and experience. The search for truth is an anthropological
constant, but the answers are different. Desires, thoughts, and actions
are motivated by dissatisfaction, curiosity, and the wish to
understand the world and to extend the limits of subjectivity. These
mental drives and activities are perspectivized in quite different ways
Character 461

in modern and postmodern fiction. The modern character is defined


by doubt, anxiety, and frustration at limits, at the closure of
possibilities; no answer satisfies the quest for identity and truth. The
postmodern narratives take this for granted and widen the
“explanatory gap”, radicalizing epistemological, ethical, and
aesthetic problems that have been dominant at least since Descartes’s
invocation of the method of doubt; they raise questions about the
mind’s functioning, the status of concepts, beliefs, judgments,
feelings, desires, actions, the imagination and the artifice of the
narrative; they probe without preconcepts into the “antithesis of the
known and the unknown” (Hegel 1977, 280), or, rather, render this
antithesis irrelevant because there is nothing that can be known
objectively.
While philosophy, psychology, and the natural sciences have
attempted to close the explanatory gap, literature has been busy to
keep it open; indeed, one of the characteristics of the development of
the novel since the eighteenth century may be understood as the
tendency to widen the gap, to give more space to the unexplainable,
the irrational, the ineffable. Concepts of reality and truth have been
supplanted by those of attitudes and perspectives; and epistemology
(the science of knowledge) has been complemented, even replaced,
with hermeneutics (the science of understanding, of perspective).
Gass in The Tunnel has Kohler call out irritatedly: “What trivial
nonsense truths are, how false in fact their elevation. It’s a mere
name, yes, a flattering designation, [...] a pure canard, this Truth; it’s
Descartes’ deceitful demon set in his cups to dream a doubting I [...]
just one more tasteless jape of Nature, or, if you like, the last itty-
bitty fib of God” (269). Whatever the expository text may do with
the idea of truth, the narrative has to prove, to experiment with, to
delineate this loss of truth, its reduction and expansion in its
situational construct. The relation between character and situation is
the crucial matrix for the fictional methods of testing, doubting, and
playing.
The character in its wholeness used to dominate this
relationship. Yet as the result of the decenterment of character in
postmodern fiction, the fictional character can be de-constructed
exactly along the lines of analytically separable human faculties or
activities that determine the relation between character and situation.
In Gass’s Tunnel, Kohler says pensively: “Is that the way I am
462 From Modernism to Postmodernism

divided ... into faculties? No one should be a university. Not that


stiff-eyed multitude that fractured plurality of egos” (43). The
“plurality of egos” and the variety of faculties or rather mental
activities and their contradictions are the playing-field of
characterization in postmodern fiction. The activities of
consciousness are as it were “abstracted”, i.e., isolated and
disconnected from one another and from the situation. We have
selected four such activities, perception, reflection, “behavior”, and
action/event, which we will later examine in more detail. They steer
and control the relation of the character with the world and its
representation. This relationship between character and situation may
accentuate the dominance of the subject or that of the situation, may
emphasize activity or passivity, consciousness or action.
Consciousness and action are the two, structurally analogical
conceptual features that define character. Two of the selected aspects
of human activity, perception and reflection, refer to consciousness
in a narrower sense, the other two to action, a more passive or active
manner of conduct.
The modes of perception, reflection, behavior, and
action/event have to be understood in our context as abstract
functions on a scale of innumerable possibilities and necessities of
transition and connection. (1) Perception is the ability to be
conscious of things; it involves the stimulation of an organ and seems
to that extent more “passive” in nature than, for instance, reflection.
It is assimilated to sensation but also to judgment. To see that
something is the case is already to apprehend and thus to know it as
such, which presupposes a certain understanding of the world in
spatio-temporal terms. In fact, all the acts of the mind are intentional
in terms of knowledge and involve a concept-mediated awareness of
the object perceived, a sense of its presence or absence; they are
therefore not purely passive processes. (2) The active and conscious
reflection of the mind relies on concept-possession, concept-use, and
belief. Reflection has a “story” that is closely related to perception
and judgment. Reflection can be the discursive and judgmental
thinking that Kant has in mind, or it can be an absolute activity in the
way Hegel defines it (we will come back to this point later). Hegel’s
concept, however, does not change reflection’s basic structure.
Action is subdivided into (3) the subconscious, unwilled, routinized,
and not self-controlled “behavior” of a character that occurs in
Character 463

answer to the requirement of the situation and does not need


reflection, since it relies on the used-to, though it can give rise to a
process of thinking, especially when something unexpected happens.
Behavior stands in contrast and into relation to (4) the agent’s
conscious, self-willed, and self-controlled, not routinized but future-
oriented action, which according to Hegel defines character, is the
signature of freedom, and signifies the dominance of the situation by
the character (Derrida 1988b). Action has a “story” that is closely
related to perception and reflection, with a before and an after the
fact. While in the lifeworld the four mentioned activities form a
continuum of causal processes, postmodern fiction gives preference
to the one and weakens or excludes the others. Both perception and
behavior are specific ways of connecting to the situation, but they
can also be considered reduction-models of reflection and action
processes respectively. By reducing the interrelation between
character and situation to only one mental state or disposition (with
the others in subordinate, partly unexpressed function), character is
decentered, and character and situation can be played against one
another. In this way, both kinds of logic, that of the character and that
of the situation, and the reasoning of their interrelation can be
suspended; both character and situation then become fantastic.
Where the situation would “normally” require action, the character
only “behaves”. Where inner conflicts would demand the depiction
of emotion, the subject reacts by only passively perceiving and
“behaving”. Where one would expect the character to be active in
reflection, he or she is described as an object.

7.8. Emotion

Since we shall not treat emotion, desire and belief separately,


though they will continuously enter the argument, this is the place to
give some attention to their structure and function, and also to their
use and appearance in postmodern fiction. Again, as with all other
fundamental properties of character, the presence/absence dialectic is
the basis of their functioning in the text. Whether emotions, desires,
or beliefs are represented or left out depends on the role that
interiority, self-examination, and inner conflict play in the
representation of character. But just as the character itself, emotion
and desire can also appear “under erasure”. Since they are
464 From Modernism to Postmodernism

constitutive parts of consciousness, they cannot be abolished even


when they are hidden. They are perspectival; they influence the way
experience is created. They underlie, motivate, accompany, and
result from all the different modes of constituting the situation. They
are placed within the process of perceiving and comprehending an
intended object, stimulate this process, and are integrated in it.
Compared to such other human activities as perception, cognition,
and action, emotion and desire are more fluid, wide-ranging, and
evasive. They are more dependent on other activities of the mind
than is the case with cognition and perception and even belief.
Perception has its “center” in the body (and the object),
cognition in rationality, and belief in a proposition. Emotions have
their center in the soul, but nobody has yet defined the place the soul
should occupy in the psychic apparatus except that it is located
somewhere, in Plato’s terms, “between” body and (rational) mind.
And nobody seems to be sure if he or she needs a soul or not.
Pynchon in his novel Mason & Dixon speaks of the “Emptiness” of
“the Soul” (204), “the dead Vacuum ever at the bottom of [the] soul,
— humiliation absolute” (356). Gass in an interview says, “[t]hat
little silent inner squeak — that’s all that’s left in our world of the
soul” (Ziegler and Bigsby 157). The Reverend Furber in Gass’s
Omensetter’s Luck notes: “You may call our soul our best, but this,
our body, is our love [...] The moist soul hangs about the body, too
heavy to rise” (213). And Kohler reflects in Gass’s The Tunnel: “the
soul in our life is the silted delta of the senses, their accumulated fat”
(47); indeed, “the soul [...] has become as shabby and soiled in its
seat as worn-out underwear” (54). But in “The Master of Secret
Revenges”, it is said: “The soul is the inner gleam which enables us
to see, to understand, to reason as I’m doing now, to skim from one
thought to another. It used to be called ‘the candle of the Lord.’ You
won’t believe it, but I have seen that light [...] Reason, you know is
the one real enemy of God. Reason is the Great Satan” (CS 224-25).
In Gaddis’s The Recognitions, the question is raised, “what
was the shape of Mr. Pivner’s soul? round or oblong? And its actions
worth as much as iodine atoms? worth five cents?” (537) In
Barthelme’s story “The Photograph”, two English scientists discuss
what to do with the photographs that have been taken inadvertently
of the soul: “’It seems to me to boil down to this: Are we better off
with souls, or just possibly without them?’ ‘Yes. I see what you
Character 465

mean. You prefer the uncertainty.’ ‘Exactly, it’s more creative’” (GP
158-59). And, finally, Borges quotes approvingly a passage by
Chesterton, as “the most lucid words ever written on the subject of
language”, and, one would have to add, written on the
insurmountable barrier between language and the soul. The quote
begins: “Man knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering,
more numberless, and more nameless than the colours of the autumn
forests... Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of
them, in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions,
be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and
squeals” (McMurray 5). That is exactly what the postmodern writers
do not believe, and want to act against, in their fictions.122
The representation of emotion located in the “soul” is a
fundamental, not only a relative, problem in fiction, especially after
the linguistic turn. According to Wittgenstein, feeling is not
expressible in language; this is one of the common assumptions in
postmodern fiction. Registering depthlessness and the “fragmentation
of the subject”, as well as “a new kind of superficiality” in
postmodernism, Jameson speaks of a “waning of affect” in post-
modern culture; feelings become, in Lyotard’s phrase, “intensities”;
according to Jameson, emotions “are now free-floating and
impersonal” (1992, 60) — which can be said also of perceptions and
reflections. In a later interview, Jameson juxtaposes the modern and
postmodern positions: “Anxiety is a hermeneutic emotion, ex-
pressing an underlying nightmare state of the world; whereas highs
and lows really don’t imply anything about the world, because you
can feel them on whatever occasion. They are no longer cognitive”
(Stephanson 4-5). In Barthelme’s Sadness, fear is one of these free-
floating “highs” that then paradoxically is attenuated in a
diagrammatic style that does not allow psychological coherence; the
author says in an interview: “I am writing a novel and the main
subject of this novel is fear” (Ziegler and Bigsby 51). Emotion of
course is subjected to a perspective of evaluation and a style of
representation. Extreme emotion can be attenuated by an “in-
adequate”, low-key style of representation as in Barthelme, or it can
be comicalized as in Elkin. With Elkin, anxiety, fear, and desire
produce obsession. Since obsession is a state of excess, it can make
anxiety and desire appear comic. According to Elkin “[c]omedy is
linked to obsession — to an individually articulated obsession”
466 From Modernism to Postmodernism

(Ziegler and Bigsby 99). The doubt of the efficiency and the
productive power of emotion and the distrust in the fruitful
interaction of emotion, desire, belief, reflection, and action make
them and their interrelation into thematic issues. They are used and
tested as activities relating to an encroaching world, not independent
of a subject, because that is impossible, but independent of, and non-
integrated into, the interiority of a self, at least not a totalizing,
centered self.
Such a case is the title story of Criers and Kibitzers,
Kibitzers and Criers. Elkin says in an interview, “there are two kinds
of people in the world, those people who are always saying ‘Woe is
me,’ because behind the ‘Woe is me’ is a system of thought; and
these other people who say ‘Ho, ho, ho,’ and behind the ‘Ho, ho, ho’
is only anecdote, no system of thought at all”. “The criers in the title
story have despair, but that’s all they have. The kibitzers only have
hope and that’s all they have” (Ziegler and Bigsby 98-99). This
identification of a specific world-view with an expressive emotion
and both with a dualistic idea of character types makes character the
mere medium for the exemplification of a way of thinking and
feeling. This double-directedness towards concreteness and
abstraction is typical of the appearance of emotion in postmodern
narrative. It makes even a situation of violence detachable from
character and comicalizable, as in Hawkes or Heller, because
brutality is abstracted from victimizer and victim. Being separated
from thought and value, emotion finally can become arbitrary and
express the capriciousness and randomness of the universe. In a
playful stance, Elkin even bases the existence of the universe, of
God, of Creation, and Art on a “whim” — “the world spins on an
axis made out of whim, just pure whim. The ultimate whimmer is
God” (Ziegler and Bigsby 102); “fiction is completely arbitrary and
whimsical” (104) — and it thus playfully and ironically reverses all
traditional concepts of wholeness, authenticity, and responsibility.
The representation or nonrepresentation of emotion
participates in the penchant of postmodern fiction towards paradox
and creates its own fundamental paradox. Narrative testifies to the
fact that feeling is inexpressible in language but needs to be
expressed to “complete” human relations to the world, for instance in
the case of crisis. In Barth’s “Menelaiad”, the presence-absence
dichotomy characterizes the emotion of love. The need of
Character 467

understanding love is at the basis of the struggle between Menelaus


and his wife Helen. She refuses to answer why she married her
husband other than with the word “love”, which even then disappears
in seven cloaks of stories and quotation marks. Since that does not
assuage his doubt, Menelaus disappears as a person and survives
only as a voice that tells his tale. Barthelme likes to problematize
theoretical issues in a story, to concretize the crucial aspect(s) of a
problem in narrative figurations. An example is the
(non)expressibility of feeling. In “For I’m the Boy Whose Only Joy
Is Loving You”, he operates (just like Barth in “Menelaiad”) with
two contradictory positions, namely the impossibility and the
necessity of expressing feeling. The protagonist Bloomsbury, being
aware of the limited ability of language to express emotion, rejects
the wish of his companions to tell them, “how does it feel?” (CB 62)
— namely, how does it feel to be separated from his wife. He says
that he can speak about the “meaning” of what happened to him but
not about “the feeling” (CB 62). Huber and Whittle grow
increasingly eager to hear more about his emotional experience, and
Whittle offers Bloomsbury “a hundred dollars [...] for the feeling”
(CB 63). They hunger for feeling: “Emotion! Whittle exclaimed,
when was the last time we had any? The war I expect Huber replied”
(CB 62). When Bloomsbury does not respond to Whittle’s demand to
“give us the feeling”, they stop the car under a tree and beat
“Bloomsbury in the face first with the brandy bottle, then with the
tire iron, until at length the hidden feeling emerged, in the form of
salt from his eyes and black blood from his ears and from his mouth,
all sorts of words” (CB 63). By using cruel violence, Hubert and
Whittle extort the feeling they crave for from their companion and —
in analogy — from art, which they think owes them emotion. This is
both a parody of the public’s demand for feeling and an exercise on
the linguistic problem of expressing emotion.
Not only has the representation of emotion become a
problem in postmodern fiction but the quality of emotion has also
changed; its intensity has been attenuated. The reason may be the
lack of great and heroic feelings in a consumer society, the
suppression of feeling by the stifling routine of everyday life, the
wearing-out of feeling by the over-exposition to violence in the
media, or the growing domination of rational thought over feeling
and desire. Gass notes, “[w]e take walking for granted, elementary
468 From Modernism to Postmodernism

seeing for granted, yet we find we cannot feel. Thought seems to


remove us” (1970, 261); and he says in an interview: “I don’t give a
shit for ideas — which in fiction represent inadequately embodied
projects. I care only for affective effects” (LeClair and McCaffery
158). The dichotomy of feeling and thought is Reverend Furber’s
problem in Gass’s Omensetter’s Luck. The would-be artist Otto in
Gaddis’s The Recognitions complains about the impossibility of
feeling a strong emotion like love:

And this, this mess, ransacking this mess looking for your own feelings
and trying to rescue them but it’s too late, you can’t even recognize them
when they come to the surface because they’ve been spent everywhere
and, vulgarized and exploited and wasted and spent wherever we could,
they keep demanding and you keep paying and you can’t ... and then all of
a sudden somebody asks you to pay in gold and you can’t. Yes, you can’t,
you haven’t got it, and you can’t (663- 64).

Since the character in postmodern fiction is decentered, integrative


feelings like joy, anxiety, or pain often lose their clear-cut contours,
are diffused if they are registered at all into what one might call
“mood”, which itself does not necessarily have a definable cause, but
is rather marked by indecision as to reason and target. Its
ambivalence makes it open to any number of rationally unrelated
associations and to rapid and unmotivated change. Just as behavior
can be understood as a reduction of action, the irritation of mood is a
kind of ersatz for the existential feeling of crisis.
The reduction of emotion to mood, however, is only one
possible consequence of the decenterment of character and emotion,
time, space, and events. In fact, emotion does not only appear in
understated but also in overstated form. The middle state is generally
missing. Feeling is either flat and toneless and takes the form of
“mood”, or it is neurotic, hallucinatory, extreme, adopting either the
“passive” and reactive form of paranoia or the “active” form of
violence. The minimalism of emotion in Robbe-Grillet, Barthelme,
or Brautigan is countered by a maximalism of emotion, paranoia, that
reacts to the pressures of the System (Pynchon, Burroughs,
Sorrentino). It seamlessly fits past and future into a hallucinatory
present and seeks to prepare for resistance against exploitation and
violence. Violence is the active form of excess. It is carried out
indirectly by the anonymous activities of the System or directly by
the single person. The reasons of the System are fairly obvious,
Character 469

absolute dominance over the people, while those of the character are
obscure. Sukenick speculates that “maybe we have this feeling [that
lies at the root of all] that our emotional life is fossilized and that the
way to get back to that authentic source of emotions may be to get
back to that precise point where your emotions are totally out of
control [...] out of our conceptional control, out of our cultural
control, out of our conventional control. That, for example, is
experience beyond language as far as I’m concerned” (LeClair and
McCaffery 285). The feeling that is out of control is not restricted to,
but also includes and is expressed in, violence, which is conspicuous
in Sukenick and other postmodern authors like Burroughs, Coover,
Hawkes, and Pynchon.
Both minimal and maximal emotional responses are related
to one another by the situation they react to, the frustrating or
threatening indefiniteness of the relation between past, present, and
future, the need to rely exclusively on the (unsatisfactory) present for
“meaning” and truth, on the conventionalization and clichédness of
the forms of emotion, and the impossibility of stating a definite cause
and goal of both emotion and desire. Yet the lack of emotion is as
much a constituent of character as is the presence of emotion. And
both the presence and the lack of emotions are, as Sukenick notes
(following Wittgenstein), “experience[s] beyond language” (LeClair
and McCaffery 284). Though Bab in William Gass’s Willie Master’s
Lonesome Wife (n.p. second section) maintains that the writer “feels
everything verbally. Objects, passions, actions”, but the language
part does not constitute, is only additional to the sense of feeling that
reaches beyond the limits of language.
Yet human emotions are not only reactions to, and generators
of situations, they are also important values. There are values within
culture and values that lie in the break of culture. In view of the
exhaustion of culture, of rational control, and of utopian hope for the
future, the feelings cherished in postmodern fiction are the non-
cultural, the non-fixed, the enigmatic emotions, love, care, the
awareness of death, and the endless gratification of creativity, of
storytelling. Though they are, in Sorrentino’s phrase, “insub-
stantialities in the Void” (MS 256), these basic feelings are all there
is in terms of values, but they are paradoxical in nature. As values,
love, care, awareness of death, creativity of the imagination, are
accessible to discourse; as experience they are not. This opposition
470 From Modernism to Postmodernism

between discourse and experience is at the basis of the texts that


speak of love, death, or storytelling. These feelings are heightened
and dramatized or enigmatized and playfully circumscribed by
linking them, or rather, their discourses, to extreme emotions like
fear and dissatisfaction, disappointed desire and resistance. They are
represented as failures, failing not in themselves but in their
connection to desire and reflection and thus in fitting into the chain
of mental activities that cannot grasp them. Unsatisfied desire and
reflection and language then turn into enemies of (heightened)
emotion. Their interaction produces ambiguity because their
discourses do not merge. Weakness, repetition, reflection, or
“inadequate” representation relativize especially “high” feelings of
heroism and prophetism (Barth, “Perseid”, “Bellerophoniad”, Giles
Goat-Boy), the sense of creativity and love (Barth, Gaddis,
Sorrentino), the energy of motivation and love (Hawkes, Travesty;
Barth, Giles Goat-Boy; Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow), the love of
communication, and the care for the people and the country (Elkin,
The Dick Gibson Show, The Franchiser). Feeling, furthermore, is
expressed in a language that contradicts and plays with emotion or
implodes it into discrepant discourse or senseless verbiage
(Barthelme). Fear of death is the extreme psychic state that needs all
the help it can get from other discourses to keep it in check, but
discourses do not interact in a balancing way. An example is Barth’s
“Night-Sea Journey”, where reflection is set against emotion, without
much success. One of the reasons why Barth is attracted to the Tales
of One Thousand and One Nights, and has recontextualized the
narrative frame situation in “Dunyazadiad” (Chimera), may have
been that in Scheherazade’s escaping death — by alternating
between making love and telling tales to the king till the day dawns,
postponing the end of the respective tale always to the next night —
basic emotion and imagination, love and the magic of storytelling
combine to overcome (the fear of) death. Three motifs that
participate in the ineffable, the fear of death, the excitement of love,
and the magic of storytelling, here interconnect in an existential
boundary situation and in their interaction create space for a multi-
perspective, for play, irony, the comic mode.
Though they are anthropological constants, the fundamental
human feelings face the problems of representation and change. Love
is the best example. Love has an inalienable “core”, but this core is
Character 471

inexplicable; it can only be experienced sensuously by the way it


appears and performs. The experience of love can only be
represented situationally, but this experience is unrelatable (cf.
Beckett, Borges; and Wittgenstein’s above-quoted remark that
emotions and “values are consigned to silence”, to the realm of the
“mystical”). But that does not detract from the importance of love,
which is one of the undisputed values of human existence. As the
author Lamont puts it in his Scrapbook in Sorrentino’s Mulligan
Stew: “Love alters not at all when it is confronted by other
alterations, nor does it bend or vacillate with benders or vacillators.
[...] It cannot be fathomed even though it is a simple thing: a golden
ring on a delicate hand, a glittering dime (thin) held gracefully by
two fingers in lustrous black kid, it’s funny. It’s sad. But, unfailingly,
it is thought to be beautiful”. The problem is that what love is can
be answered only “through the agency of certain texts” (291).
Love is an internal, nondisputable but nonexplainable value.
In Barth’s “Menelaiad”, love is a “fearsome mystery”, even an
“unimaginable notion”, and finally “the absurd, unending possibility
of love” (LF 151, 150). In The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy,
it has a mysterious, unifying force. Love creates identity. As we will
show later, love in Giles Goat-Boy has a saving value for most of the
positive characters. By the intimate and deeply existential
communication between the self and the other, it overcomes all
difficulties, suspends the antagonism between action and reflection,
body and mind, the present and the future, between appearance and
being. In Pynchon’s V., “[l]ove is love. It shows up in strange
displacements” (V. 387). Though love easily becomes institu-
tionalized and the institutions are part of the routinizing System,
“[l]ove never goes away, Never completely dies”, as Geli Tripping
sings in Gravity’s Rainbow (289). For Blicero the point is “not to
love because it was no longer possible to act [...] but to be helplessly
in a condition of love” (97), while Roger Mexico believes in love as
a guide “to life and to joy” (126). Having lost his beloved Jessica, he
has the feeling that “he’s losing a full range of life, of being for the
first time at ease in the Creation” (629). Falteringly, Otto says to
Esme in Gaddis’s The Recognitions: “It’s as though when you lose
someone ... lose contact with someone you love, then you lose
contact with everything, with everyone else, and nobody ... and
nothing is real anymore” (515). In Barthelme’s “Rebecca”, “[t]he
472 From Modernism to Postmodernism

tenth [reason for writing the story] is that one should never cease
considering human love, which remains as grisly and golden as ever,
no matter what is tattooed upon the warm tympanic page” (SSt 284).
At the end of Gass’s The Recognition, love seems to be an alternative
to art as a force for resisting the counterfeits of a corrupted society.
At the end of The Passion Artist, Konrad Vost, in making love to
Hania, comes to know the “transports of that singular experience
which makes every man an artist”. Imagination, art, and love enter
into a predetermined union; Hawkes explains: “I meant every man as
artist simply in the sense that sexuality necessitates a free exercising
of the imagination. [...] For me the imagination is always and
inevitably erotic [...] art comes first, sex second; there can be no sex
without what we can only call artistic consciousness” (Ziegler and
Bigsby 186, 187).
It is obvious that there is a difference between the
unexplainable, enigmatic experience of love and its discourses or the
situations it figures in. This is why the postmodern writer can ironize
and comicalize the discourses of love without damaging the feeling
of love. Situation and discourse can never grasp what love is because
the feeling extends beyond all discourses, individual cases, and
narrated situations. Yet since love can only be represented “through
the agency of certain texts” (MS 291), Lamont in Sorrentino’s
Mulligan Stew is forced to construct an endless list of possibilities,
which turns out to be a rather comicalizing summary of discourses
that are in fact irrelevant for the description of what love is. It does
not matter because love eludes the definatory power of language
anyway. The question is asked: “Can anyone explain the wonder of
love?” As an answer the goddess Aphrodite appears to “three poor
and simple fishermen”, asking them to “explain the wonder of love”,
offering herself for a night of love as prize for the best answer. The
reply of the third fisherman is the prize-winning one: “‘The wonder
of love is’ — and here he broke wind — ‘catchin’ that and puttin’ it
in a bottle!’” (MS 290) In Coover’s story “The Marker”, from the
collection Pricksongs and Descants, love is depicted as a
demonic/comic spirit. In this story a young artist called Jason puts his
book aside in preparation for going to bed, but then he wanders
around the room without orientation. Finally, directed by the laughter
of his wife, he finds the bed, makes love to her, wondering, however,
for a moment, “if this is really his wife”; he is then reassured by the
Character 473

thought that “there is no alternate possibility” (90). Yet this closure


of possibilities is a mistake because, first, his lovemaking is
inexplicably interrupted by the police, and, second, he is horrified to
see that the woman he has been engaged with, is indeed his wife, but
the rotting corpse of his wife, which then, to make a bad thing worse,
“follows him punishingly in movement for a moment, as a sheet of
paper will follow a comb” (91).

7.9. Desire

Another aspect of character, which deserves a separate


treatment before we analyze four links between character and
situation — perception, reflection, behavior, action — is the role
desire plays and its intimate relation to the imagination and to
language, which both extend their scope in response to new desires.
Desire is an inner state, but it is not clear whether it is an emotion or
not. David Hume called it a “passion”, yet denied that such a passion
contains “any representative quality, which renders it a copy of any
other existence or modification” (1960, iii, 17, 39). The question is
whether desire has only a causal, functional role in the determination
of action and behavior and the stimulation of reflection and
imagination, as a kind of energizing principle, or if it has its own
semantic content and intentional character that determines what its
object is. One might think of a causal chain that consists of an
emotion causing a desire causing an action, or one might locate the
emotion within the desire that calls for action, or vice versa. In our
context the problem need not be solved. Obviously the relationship
between emotion and desire depends on the kind of emotion.
Emotions of satisfaction will have a less intimate relationship with
desire than those of dissatisfaction. And yet, the nature of desire is
such that, whatever its content and intention may be in the concrete
case, it also has a function as a general disposition of body, soul, and
mind that craves for and initiates change, independent of satisfaction.
As a driving force and a causally operative state of the appetitive
apparatus, it strives for satisfaction; but since fulfillment produces a
static state of satiety and since life is a dynamic process, satisfaction
is deconstructed to make room for new desire. Giving birth to ever
new desire, desire is in fact insatiable, a principle of inexhaustible
energy, rejecting the Hegelian whole, turning to past or future, and
474 From Modernism to Postmodernism

also desiring the impossible. Elkin describes in “Plot” the circle of


desire: “Here is character’s oxygen cycle: Vague desire becomes
specific desire, specific desire becomes will, will becomes decision,
decision action, action consequence. Consequence is either
acceptable or unacceptable. If it’s acceptable the chain stops, if
unacceptable it begins all over again. But always, peeking over the
will’s shoulder — to pick up just one element in the chain — is the
character’s brooding, critical and concerned presence”, ready to
“start the chain again” (74).
Since both poststructuralist philosophy and postmodern art
shun traditional, totalizing concepts like “meaning”, “truth”,
“character”, “identity”, but, influenced by Freud’s libidinal economy,
affirm “transformations of energy” (Lyotard), desire as an energizing
principle steps into the foreground. In fact, two camps in
poststructuralism can be distinguished by their emphasizing either
language or desire. Bertens writes: “If we follow Lash in globally
distinguishing between two major camps in French post-fifties
theory, a Saussurean one that emphasizes language and structure (the
early Barthes, Lacan, Derrida) and a Nietzschean one that
emphasizes power and desire (Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari), then
Lyotard is unique in his reorientation from the latter to the former.
The general drift in the late 1960s and early 1970s was from the
linguistic position to a position that highlighted power and desire”
(1995, 134). With regard to the early Lyotard, Scott Lash speaks of
an “aesthetics of desire” that is the basis of the “postmodern de-
differentiation”, and he notes that “the postmodern”, in its “break
with formalism”, “is inextricably bound up with a theory of desire”
(174). The free flow of desire, emphasized by the early Lyotard
(1971; 1974) and Deleuze and Guattari (Anti-Oedipus), of course
strengthens force over form, vitalism and intensity over rational
intentions and social engagement. Even if desire and its manifold
manifestations are repressed by the System, or if desire is no longer
directly expressible, it is still at the basis of everything that is said,
not the least as a vague mood of dissatisfaction. Hassan writes:
“[T]he main point is this: art [...] is becoming, like the personality of
the artist himself, an occurrence without clear boundaries. [...] That is
why Jean François Lyotard enjoins readers [...] to recognize as truly
artistic nothing but initiatives or events, in whatever domain they
may occur” (1977, 57).
Character 475

Any number of postmodern writers, for instance Barthelme,


Elkin, Gaddis, Gass, or Sukenick, demonstrate that the desire for
change, for metamorphosis, but also for satisfaction is a fundamental
given of the character’s psyche. Gass’s fictions thematize the
disparity of human faculties; they are fictions of desire, of the desire
to close the gap between knowing and living, reflection and feeling,
the intellect and the senses. In his story “Mrs. Mean” from In the
Heart of the Heart of The Country and Other Stories, the
narrator/artist figure is torn between his urge for abstraction and
imaginative projections on the one hand, and the drive for contact
with reality on the other: “The desire is as strong as any I have ever
had: to see, to feel, to know, and to possess!” (141). In Gass’s novel
Omensetter’s Luck, Henry Pimber, who despairs of his low position
in life and his separation from nature, desires “the chance of being
new ... of living lucky [like his model Omensetter] and of losing [the
current] Henry Pimber” (58), by entering the romantic dream of
living simply and in natural harmony. In Gaddis’s The Recognitions,
Stanley desires to write a musical work that would be “the expression
of something higher”, that would reach out for “some transcendent
judgment” (659), while Gwyon in the same novel desires to “recall,
and summon back, a time before death entered the world, before
accident, before magic, and, before magic despaired to become
religion” (16). Finch in Sukenick’s Up “submits to chance and the
gratifications of the moment” but “all he wants to be is somebody
else” (216). Nixon, in Coover’s The Public Burning, feels “a desire
[...] to reach the heart of things, to participate deeply in life” (128).
Martin Halpin, character and narrator in Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew,
looks for “the perfect antidote to cure my gnawing misery of desire”
(287), his “[m]ad fleshy desires” (295), his sexual dreams of Daisy
Buchanan (287). Elkin connects desire and will, the result being a life
of obsession (not madness), which is also typical for other
postmodern fiction:

It’s my notion — and I suppose it’s a lot of writers’ notion — that the
thing which energizes fiction is the will. In the conventional fiction of the
nineteenth century, it is the will to get out of one class and make it up into
another class. We’re no longer so interested in that, since everybody more
or less has the things that he needs. The conventional drive toward money
has been replaced. At least it’s been replaced in fiction, and what we read
about now — and what I write about — are people whose wills have been
colored by some perfectly irrational desire. In the case of Boswell, it is the
476 From Modernism to Postmodernism

will to live forever. In the case of Dick Gibson, it is the will to live the
great life which is the trite life. In the case of “The Bailbondsman”, it is to
know the answers to questions that no one can know. In the case of
Ashenden in “The Making of Ashenden”, it is the desire to find an
absolutely pure human being — someone as pure as himself. In the case of
Feldman, it is to sell the unsalable thing and to make the buyer pay as
much for it as possible. [...] My characters [...] are well off [...] follow their
own, irrational — but sane — obsessions which, achieved, would satisfy
them. Alas, these guys never catch up with their obsessions (LeClair and
McCaffery 117-18).

The protagonist in Boswell: A Modern Comedy explains at the end of


the book that “I experienced, sharp as pain, deep as rage, a massive
greed, a new knowledge that it was not enough, that nothing was ever
enough” (365); and in A Bad Man the title hero, Leo Feldman, in an
onset of self-doubt sees his life, in a paradoxical formulation, as “a
life of wanting things found wanting, calling out for the uncalled for”
(217). The excess of desire over its potential satisfaction makes it
impossible for desire ever to be complete, to attain a satisfactory
form, ever to be completely expressed even in wishes or in language;
it thus either exhausts itself, which also exhausts life (cf. Slothrop in
Gravity’s Rainbow), or it defers complete satisfaction to the end of
life and, by analogy, the end of history, as well as beyond language
and the end of the story, thus also thwarting and mocking the
reader’s desire for a satisfactory final resolution, which he or she
expects in consonance with the traditional epistemological and
ethical assumptions. As Sukenick points out in the story “The
Permanent Crisis”, the problem is that desire cannot fulfill itself
without form and goal, and that thinking about purpose and goal
blocks and exhausts desire instead of stimulating it. The
husband/author experiences writer’s block and a personal crisis in his
relation to the world. His capacity to desire something is exhausted,
or rather the forms and goals of desire are worn out. He feels
something “like the exhaustion of desire no, more, as if he couldn’t
discover the forms for desire, or as if he wanted nothing because he
could find nothing to want” (DN 2).
As we saw before, Barthelme in some of his stories likes to
make a narrative issue out of human attitudes and the concepts
abstracted from them. He thus ironizes, for instance, belief, desire,
and also irony itself. In “On the Step of the Conservatory”, he
renders “a picture of Never Enough”, of the “exacerbating” (Ziegler
Character 477

and Bigsby 59) drive to attain ever better and more satisfactory
things and results. In “Daumier”, he structures the whole story in
terms of the dialectic of desire and satisfaction, ironizing at the same
time the idea of a “real” and “true” self. The writer/narrator Daumier
speaks to his wife of the “ dirty great villain”, the self, the point
being that “[i]t is insatiable. It is always, always hankering. It is what
you might call rapacious to a fault. The great flaming mouth to the
thing is never in this world going to be stuffed full” (Sad 163-64).
Since he fears that “[t]he false selves in their clatter and boister and
youthful brio will slay and bother and push out and put to all types of
trouble the original, authentic self” (Sad 163), he decides to construct
surrogate selves in his fiction in order to ease the dilemma. And
indeed, the “authentic” self appears to have succeeded in creating a
surrogate Daumier who “is doing very well” since he “knows his
limits. He doesn’t overstep. Desire has been reduced in him to a
minimum” (Sad 164). However, since he is thus only “in principle
fifty percent sated”, Daumier then creates a second surrogate person,
“a quiet, thoughtful chap who leads a contemplative life”. The latter,
in the course of meditation, makes one of the most important
statements about how satisfaction can be attained: “It is easy to be
satisfied if you get out of things what inheres in them, but you must
look closely, take nothing for granted, let nothing become routine.
You must fight against the cocoon of habituation which covers
everything if you let it” (Sad 179). “There are always openings, if
you can find them. There is always something to do” (Sad 183). The
double-edged irony of the story, however, is that the author Daumier
becomes attracted to the Lady Celeste, of whom the first fictional
surrogate Daumier is enamored, “gets her out of his [fictional,
surrogate] life and into [his] own” (Sad 177), i.e., his “real” life, and
then he packs his surrogate selves away until he should need them
again. Satisfied for the present (though he knows that this satisfaction
is only for the moment), he repeats the second surrogate self’s insight
in almost identical words, thus phrasing a possibility that, if it could
come true, which it never does, would make people happy. There is,
however, at least an attenuated utopian hope, which, however,
paradoxically does not depend on the uniqueness and authenticity of
the self, but on the disposal of the self and its dissolution as center:
“The self cannot be escaped, but it can be, with ingenuity and hard
478 From Modernism to Postmodernism

work, distracted. There are always openings, if you can find them,
there is always something to do” (Sad 183).
The desire for openings complicates the relation of desire to
consciousness and thought. The relation between desire and other
mental activities like feeling and thought is fundamentally elusive
and opaque. As a dynamic disposition, a source of energy, desire
contains the reason for what it wants in itself, constituting an
unending sequence of desire-satisfaction- desire, etc.: movement. If
satisfaction is not reached, this does not fundamentally change the
situation, for then desire either carries on with the same intentional
target ad libitum, or it slackens and starts a new sequence. When
desire stops, life stops. As an energizing principle, desire is
something different from emotion, though in every concrete case it
closely interacts with other causally operative states such as emotion
and thought in a causal chain. Desire also kindles the imagination,
not as a psychic factor in a concrete case with a specific semantic
content and the function to initiate a specific concrete action, but as
an abstractable dynamic disposition, a causally operative principle
that calls for change. It actually can be said to blend with the
imagination that, as the performer of possibility-creations, has a
similar kind of structure. The imagination yearns for and desires the
state of the other, satisfies this desire by the creation of its
figurations, and then exhausts satisfaction, creates new desires and
satisfactions, and so on ad infinitum. This desire-satisfaction-desire
pattern of the imagination in postmodern fiction turns into the “pure”
drive for deconstruction and reconstruction. It is a desire for
abstract/concrete expression of the drive itself, its self-creation by
means of the substrate of the story and its language. This process of
pure desire then also (re)creates the self as language and as narrative
process in the manner that Federman and Sukenick describe in
above-cited passages.
This primary role of desire (for the other, for something
indefinable, unreachable) distinguishes in one way or another, as
obsession, mood, or stimulus of the imagination, both the writing and
the characters of postmodern fiction. Federman speaks of “the
looseness, the irrationality, the delirium of my language”(LeClair and
McCaffery 137). One might argue that it is the desire for the other
(and the aura of mystery and the complication of psychology) that is
one of the legacies that postmodern narrative bequeathed to the
Character 479

fiction of the eighties and nineties. A wide variety of authors, for


instance, in alphabetical order, Paul Auster, Harold Brodkey, Richard
Ford, Ernest G. Gaines, Barry Hannah, Bobbie Ann Mason, Tony
Morrison, Harold Powers, and others that figure in the literary scene
of the eighties and the nineties, bear witness to the unavoidable
influence of the postmodern scenario. This obsession with desire,
together with the unattainability of its objects, and the production of
immense energy between the two poles, dissatisfaction and desire,
are also an important reason for the prominence of the “novel of
excess”, which provides a wide outlet for the narrative energies not
only in Barth, Pynchon, Coover, Gaddis or McElroy, but also in
Brodkey, Powers, Mailer, and others.

7.10. Belief

Related to desire, emotion, and thought is belief, which is a


propositional attitude. It cancels or reduces by factual, moral,
metaphysical commitment the complexity of mental processes; it has
the virtue of saving the subject from the ambiguity of self-
consciousness, and compensates for the fundamentally instable and
incomplete nature of enlightenment and of all notions of meaning.
Various kinds of belief are defined by their immediate objects and
situational circumstances, their strength and grade of certainty, their
comprehensiveness, or the narrow or wide range of their application.
Belief can be public or private, specific or general. On an abstract,
generalizing level, “the ideology of belief forms the basis of the
conviction that a given regime reflects the natural order and
hierarchy of the world and embodies in its principles a universally
valid ideal of human life”. The psychology of belief claims “that a
prior acceptance of values is necessary for a true comprehension of
the nature of things” Cascardi 1992, 180).123 Beliefs are principles
open to validation and refutation; they are structured entities related
to other psychological states, to knowledge and doubt, to other kinds
of mental activity like desire, emotion, reflection, and imagination,
with which they stand in (confirmative or negative) causal
interrelation.
If the necessary foundations of (self-)belief have been eroded
in human consciousness (which is ever mutable and incomplete), the
desire to achieve certainty goes the other way, stimulates self-
480 From Modernism to Postmodernism

reflection, and questions belief as a foundational principle, or it falls


back into self-deception, accepting a fixed version of belief without
further questions. The contradictory impulses of belief and reflection
cause and dramatize a split of the self, a struggle between faith and
doubt. The Reverend Furber in Gass’s Omensetter’s Luck is
characterized by the fact that he has a mask of beliefs but in fact has
“literally [...] no real beliefs”, and that there is a “distance between
his feelings and his actions”, a contrast “between his inner and outer
life” (Gass 1969, 100). Beliefs, however, are not easily got rid of.
Gass says in an interview: “Really, it is nice to cleanse yourself of
beliefs. It is positively pleasant to find out you don’t need to believe.
[...] It’s a catharsis of the mind. A lot of contemporary writers are
trying to kill beliefs off, step on them, finish them off. But, of course,
you can’t; they spring up again” (Ziegler and Bigsby 166). All the
characters in Omensetter’s Luck are witnesses to this paradoxical
need of both having and questioning beliefs. For himself, Gass
emphasizes the aesthetic attraction of a system of beliefs: “So, I’m
caught between the beauties of belief and the knowledge that most of
this is, indeed, false and, indeed, pernicious” (Ziegler and Bigsby
166-67).
Gass’s ambiguous attitude towards belief, exhibited in
Omensetter’s Luck or in The Tunnel, is programmatic for postmodern
fiction in general. Belief is countered by belief, as in Barth’s The Sot-
Weed Factor where the belief in innocence and distance is opposed
by the belief in experience and engagement, or in Hawkes’s Travesty
where the belief in design is balanced by the knowledge of life’s
debris and the belief in life is checked by that in death. Or the
principle of belief is challenged by the counter-principle of disbelief.
The radical confrontation of the two gives occasion for irony and the
comic mode. Barthelme opposes belief and disbelief in the story
programmatically called “The Belief”. As is often the case, he
ironizes the fixedness of human attitudes, indicating the postmodern
position of contradiction and ambivalence. He carries both positions,
belief and disbelief (and the either-or constellation in general), ad
absurdum in the conversation between two female and two male
senior citizens. One of the women utters belief in a superstitious
formula, to which one of the men responds with an uncalled-for
summation of negative views: “I don’t believe it [...] I don’t believe
in magic and I don’t believe in superstition. I don’t believe in
Character 481

Judaism, Christianity, or Eastern thought. None of ‘em. I didn’t


believe in the First World War [...] I didn’t believe in the Second
World War either and I was in it [...] They didn’t ask me, they told
me [to become a soldier]. But I still had my inner belief, which was
that I didn’t believe in it” (GD 77). The meaning of the word
“believe” is then complicated by transferring it from general, abstract
phenomena to a factual situation. One of the senior women asks the
disbelieving man: “Do you have prostate trouble?” and when he
answers in the affirmative, she remarks: “Good [...] I don’t believe
there is such a thing as a prostate” (GD 79). The old man, who has in
the meantime further completed the list of what he does not believe
in, finally acknowledges only one exception. He believes that “[i]t is
forbidden to grow old”. The two women agree, but both note in
identical words: “I could do without the irony” (GD 80).
In all these cases, belief is countered by reflection, be it by
the fictional character or by the author/narrator. Yet not only
reflection and belief but also desire and belief stand in a dialectic
relationship to one another. Desire can assist belief, or it may
deconstruct it. Belief in established social and religious norms serves
to stabilize the network of psychological states. The social dimension
of desire, namely to feel, think, act according to a “transcendental
ego” (Kant) and a system of internalized values, creates or supports
belief, while it at the same time resists desire as a dark, inscrutable
force understood with Freud as an expression of discontent with
social conventions, constraints, and rules. Conversely, the
emancipatory potential of untamed desire freed from all social
constraints thwarts belief-systems and directs its transformative
power towards self-enlargement and change. According to Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari, our task is “to learn from the psychotic
how to shake off the Oedipal yoke and the effects of power, in order
to initiate a radical politics of desire freed from all beliefs” (Seem
xxi). The most “natural” interrelation between desire and belief is
one of continuous strife and struggle. There is no truly higher or
natural principle for synthesizing desire, belief, and reason.
Postmodern fiction stimulates the limit-transcending energy
of mobile desire. The latter de-values the rules of narrative and
empowers the imagination to transcend every principle of distinction
and all boundaries of order. Yet beliefs do not disappear. Their
signification of continuity, coherence, and union is pertinent for the
482 From Modernism to Postmodernism

construction of narrative, even if belief and its fixedness are played


with, ironized, and negated. Beliefs, truths, conventions are
operational media and signposts of orientation that build up a horizon
of formation and stability. They are needed for the composition of
narrative and the organization of its flow of time because, even if the
force of life and not the form of order is the goal of narration, force,
flow and change only become visible against the background of
pattern and structure, the forms of containment and determination.
Beliefs emerge as part of a multiperspective that in its struggle with
beliefs, their “fixities and definites” (Coleridge), keeps open the
balance of possibilities. It thus produces uncertainty; and uncertainty
becomes a source of productivity. Gass says, “I don’t know, most of
the time, what I believe. Indeed, as a fiction writer I find it
convenient not to believe things. Not to disbelieve things either, just
to move into a realm where everything is held in suspension”; and he
adds, “it would be a grievous disappointment if we ever solved
anything” (LeClair and McCaffery 22, 30).124 In postmodern fiction,
the mental activities themselves and their values take the forefront,
not the effect of desire and feeling, thought and belief upon a center,
or a character and its interiority. The values of stasis like belief and
truth, narrative tradition struggle with those of dynamis — the energy
of renewal, the processes of perception, thinking, feeling, desire.
There is one more circumstance that has to be mentioned in
this context. Beliefs and truths not only dissolve under the impact of
reflection, desire, and imagination, they, so to speak, take their
“revenge”. The liberating psychic flow, the desire for deconstruction,
for opening borderlines and the dissemination of meaning again reify
into beliefs, as is obvious in the poetological statements of the writers
quoted above, which then again are dissolved in the practice of
narration (as is especially the case with Gass and Hawkes). The
strategies of storytelling then are reflected upon again and abstracted
into maxims, to be flexibilized again in the process of narration, and
so on ad infinitum. The circle, the spiral, or the Moebius strip are
obviously enlightening metaphors for postmodern fiction; they
describe not only the energy of storytelling and the interrelation and
struggle of mental capacities but also the unending rivalry and
contest of practical and theoretical performances.
Character 483

7.11. Perception, Consciousness, and the Object

“Perceiving” the outer world of space, time, people, and


events is a matter of the senses. It is intentional, depends on a spatio-
temporal pre-understanding of the world, on concept-possession and
concept-use, on judgments; it rates the experience as illusory or true.
In all cases, perception underlies the duality of consciousness, of
consciousness that is not only always conscious of something but
also conscious of being conscious of something. Sense-perception
has a functional role within the mental economies; it is assimilated to
other mental phenomena, which are paradigms of intentionality,
beliefs, emotions, desires, and actions, while it is at the same time
their irrefutable base. Vaihinger claims that “only what is felt, what
confronts us in the world of perceptions, whether it be internal or
external, is real” (105). The belief in the primacy of perception
permeates the whole work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. But also the
reverse is true: perception also depends on consciousness. Merleau-
Ponty notes: “However firm my perceptive grasp of the world may
be, it is entirely dependent upon a centrifugal movement which
throws me toward the world” (1974, 124-25). Consciousness, being
always intentional in its perceiving something, in Wittgenstein’s
terms, is a “seeing as” (1958, xi, and passim) the “echo of a thought
in sight” (212) or, in Scruton’s words, an “unasserted thought” (chs.
7 and 8), the “seeing [of] aspects”.
Kant, Husserl, Wittgenstein, and Sartre have all emphasized
that, in picturing something, the images are forms of consciousness
of an object, and generally fragmentary at that; they may also be a
direct function of memory, but are not identical with the objects they
represent. And in consciousness, Whitehead says, “[t]here will be a
general idea in the background flittingly, waveringly, realized by the
few in its full generality — or perhaps never expressed in any
adequate universal form with persuasive force. [...] But this general
idea, whether expressed or implicitly just below the surface of
consciousness, embodies itself in special expression after special
expression” (1969, 18-19). There is an interrelation between the
things seen, the consciousness of seeing these things and a “general
idea” or “the echo of a thought”. Together they structure the activity
of consciousness’s seeing things and of consciousness’s being
conscious of seeing things. The perceptions themselves, according to
484 From Modernism to Postmodernism

Wittgenstein, are either subject to the will (seeing an aspect) and to


cognitive states (supposing, hypothesizing), or derive from the
unconscious, or they combine the conscious and the unconscious.
The representation of perception may focus on the external thing, on
observation, may even display an extreme externalism, thus keeping
a distance between subject and object; or it may be expressive and
emotionally attuned to the intended target, dissolving the distance; or
it may subsume all that it perceives under the general idea that is the
basis of understanding and may make the thing seen a symbol of
thought; or it may create a desire for action that would change the
situation with a special purpose, a given goal in mind.
The consciousness of something and the consciousness of
being conscious of something together define the relation between
subject and object, and with it the self-understanding of the subject.
The relation between subject and object has become problematic, at
the latest since Kant, up to the point where the relation between
mental image and object of the image, between signifier and
signified, has lost all transparency. This creates a potential of
discrepancies, insufficiencies, problems that postmodern narrative is
subject to and makes use of. One way to employ this problematic
relationship between subject and object is to cut off the normal
processing of the perception-data by the categories of understanding,
so that perception stands alone, with or without (futile) attempts of
consciousness to understand what is perceived by reflecting upon it.
In the following, we are concerned with various cases of such an
isolation of sense-perception for the purpose of acquiring knowledge,
a procedure that may involve the suspension of the causal processes
of the mind. Our examples provide three versions of this reductionist
method of world-making and world-understanding. Beckett’s short
prose piece “Imagination Dead Imagine” deconstructs the perceiving
subject, which becomes the narrative voice, confronted with the
mystery of the imagination and a kind of universal void. The
“general ideas” of consciousness that here direct the sense-
impressions are universal ideas, i.e., imagination and life. Robbe-
Grillet’s Jealousy reduces the subject to a perceiving consciousness
engulfed by the object world that reifies the emotions; the general
idea within consciousness in this case is both general and personal: it
is jealousy. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch exemplifies the implosion of
objects into the self, which feels like an empty shell; the idea in the
Character 485

background is the existence of a “terroristic universe”, from which


the self attempts to escape by movement, transformation, and
metamorphosis of the body. All three examples show a passivity of
the subject; perception is being used to represent the unknown, to
cover the void, or to avoid the dominance of the other. In all cases, a
note of mystery pervades the narrative. It is the result of the failure of
consciousness to coordinate and order its faculties in the processing
of the data of experience.
At this point one more qualification has to be made with
regard to the relation between “perception” and “behavior”. Of
course, the “behavior” of a subject, which is here distinguished from
merely perceiving a situation, can also include mere observing, just
as behavior itself can also be observed, and in Robbe-Grillet’s
Jealousy the description of gestures and movements goes hand in
hand with the description of inanimate objects, though the latter by
far dominates. But it seems advisable to reserve the term “behavior”
for the case of a more “factual” attitude towards what is there. The
difference is twofold and will later be demonstrated in an analysis of
Barthelme’s work. First, in the case of perception, as it is understood
here, there is an active observer, a narrated subject and a narrator;
and, second, the presentation of what is seen and can be seen has the
cohesion of an image.125 If the conduct of a narrated character is
depicted factually, as “behavior”, the narrative perspective is more
distant, more reductive; the result then is diagrammatic and not
image-like, leaving many empty spaces to be filled by the reader.
The difference between creating an image or a “diagram” of a
situation is the difference between picturing something and merely
thinking of it. Creating an imaginary scene obviously need not
involve having extensive mental images of it, though what it raises in
the mind is always a situation.

7.11.1. The Mysteries of the Void: Samuel Beckett, “Imagination


Dead Imagine”

Beckett’s “Imagination Dead Imagine” is a late example of


what Hugh Kenner calls Beckett’s “aesthetic of ultra-compression”
(207, passim). The process of perception articulates, again in
Kenner’s words, “the mysteries of voice and person” (226); and these
mysteries take the form of paradox, rendered in sharply visual,
486 From Modernism to Postmodernism

concrete terms, in terms of the postmodern situational-paradoxical


montage in flux, representing the dichotomies of life and thought,
imagination and reflection, beginning and end, continuity and
interruption, the void and the filling. The imaginative perception of
the piece is written in the typical Beckettian spirit of “I can’t go on,
I’ll go on”. Out of a white void appears a white rotunda, in which
two white bodies are lying, each in a semicircle, still alive though
barely (“Hold a mirror to their lips, it mists”). The text consists of a
skeletal prologue that points to the underlying ideas, imagination and
life; it describes two different sightings of the rotunda, and a
melancholic epilogue that returns to the general idea, the creative
potential of the imagination and its failure. The text begins with a
refusal to agree to resignation, which is followed by a sudden and
magical vision:

No trace anywhere of life, you say, pah, no difficulty there, imagination


not dead yet, yes, dead, good, imagination dead imagine. Islands, waters,
azure, verdure, one glimpse and vanished, endlessly, omit. Till all white in
the whiteness the rotunda. No way in, go in, measure. Diameter three feet,
three feet from ground to summit of the vault. Two diameters at right
angles AB CD divide the white ground into two semicircles ACB BDA.
Lying on the ground two white bodies, each in its semicircle. White too
the vault and the round wall eighteen inches high from

The reason for the reduction of narrative to the visual is here


the enigma of the imagination that resists understanding and the
paradox of the imaginative act that, despite an act’s logically being
defined by its intentionality, appears to lack this intentionality, at
least recognizable instrumental intentionality, except for an
uncoordinated movement in and out and a mechanical activity of
measuring. Consciousness is present and appears to follow what
happens with fascination but without any will or chance of control.
All external conditions are expunged (“islands, waters, azure,
verdure”) in favor of the white rotunda, of what sometimes appears
to be an inner view of the skull, not quite without irony and humor.
Everything is created by sensory impressions in situational
application, as physical activities that document the haphazardness of
exercising the imaginative faculty at all. Paradoxes that transcend
rational power suggest the impotence of consciousness to control and
understand the imagination. Everything is dynamic and spontaneous,
but highly systematized as well. The immeasurable, the inner world,
Character 487

is measured spatially, mechanically; so are the residues of life, the


two bodies, who “might well pass for inanimate but for the left eyes
which at incalculable intervals suddenly open wide and gaze in
unblinking exposure long beyond what is humanly possible” (“IDI”
65). Like everything else, the imperatives are contradictory: “Go
back out [...] go back in”. Confronted with these oppositions, con-
sciousness appears at a loss. Though the attitude of the narrative
voice is strictly observant and the description purely visual, an
emotional engagement becomes recognizable through the rhetoric of
the text. Passivity and activity of the observer interrelate and
contradict, just as do perception and reflection, creative production
and negation of its results.
What happens is outside and inside; it is a chain of dynamic
events, mysterious, uncontrollable, and ineffable. The movement of
the imagination, it appears, is free, but overwhelmed and determined
by forces not contained by (rational) form; it is marked by the rise
and fall of extremes, heat and cold, whiteness and blackness. Their
manifestations rotate in circular movements with pauses of
incalculable length in between. Though the narrative voice seemingly
creates all this, it appears to produce itself in actions independent of
human will and ability. Whatever the creating force behind the
images, the experiencing subject, being passive consciousness, needs
to wait for the results without orientation. The results are always
different, never twice the same. The imagination is overwhelmed or
reduced at the end by what is pure vision without interpretation, pure
force without form, pure changing performance without recognizable
“reality”. Though its different manifestations are “supplied by the
same source”, consciousness has “still no trace” of this source. In this
text, stability is only guaranteed by the play of extremes, however,
not by the extremes themselves, i.e., heat and cold, whiteness and
blackness, which combine in the performance, but rather by the
pause that interrupts and balances their movements, giving them
stability and continuity. Activating the force of the imagination from
the void, the subject is made its object, loses the freedom as subject;
its exercising will-power passes away in waiting and finally in
resignation. The text ends with the words: “Leave them [the bodies]
there, sweating and icy, there is better elsewhere. No, life ends and
no, there is nothing elsewhere, and no question now of ever finding
again that white speck lost in whiteness, to see if they still lie still in
488 From Modernism to Postmodernism

the stress of that storm, or of a worse storm, or in the black dark for
good or the great whiteness unchanging, and if not what they are
doing” (66). Presence has been replaced by absence. There is no
middle, only beginning and end, and no repetition, only variation. In
Iser’s terms, “the imaginary remains a blank that constantly invites
fillings, but then empties itself again when cognitive constraints
thematize the imaginary” (1993, 240).126

7.11.2. “Objectified Subjectivity”: Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jealousy

The “abstraction” of the text from the usual human condition


by concentrating exclusively on sensory impression can
paradoxically be the result of a new concept of “realism”. That is
what Robbe-Grillet said he strived for in reducing the world to visual
perception. In an attempt to offer an alternative to the traditional
novel and to concentrate on “[g]estures and objects” that are “there
before being something”, before all patternings and significations, he
chooses “a neutral description of the world free of all presuppositions
to guarantee the immediacy of the relationship between subject and
object, self and other, consciousness and reality” (Carroll 1982, 11).
Robbe-Grillet first calls his method “objective realism”; he later
revises the term, calling his goal “total subjectivity” or “objectified
subjectivity” (New Novel 1964, 130ff.), which means that though the
world is rendered as it is perceived and valorized by a particular
subject, it resists all categorizations in terms of levels, is in fact non-
assimilable, is devoid of all relation. In spite of this
subjective/objective forging of the objects perceived, “[t]he object is
no longer a center of correspondences, a welter of sensations and
symbols: it is merely an optical resistance [... H]ere the object does
not exist beyond its phenomenon” (Barthes 1972, 14-15).
What this means is exemplified in one of Robbe-Grillet’s
earlier novels, Jealousy, where the jealous husband/protagonist, a
planter, keeps watch from various locations over his wife, called
A ..., and her possible lover, Frank, in the balcony-enveloped banana
plantation house. Refusing any psychological analysis, rejecting the
doctrine of interiority, and denying an opening into dialogue, Robbe-
Grillet reduces all emotion to camera-eye visual description from the
optical point-of-view of the narrator-protagonist. The levels of ob-
jectivity and subjectivity do not interrelate, and human passion
Character 489

“remains on their surface, making no attempt to penetrate within,


since there is nothing inside” (qtd. in Morrisette 33). The
consequence is a reification of consciousness and feeling, imprisoned
in a universe of hard surface. “Reading becomes a lateral movement
from one space to another, contiguous space. But the second space is
never entirely distinct from the first” (Gibson 227). Correspondingly,
no hierarchizing principle guides the description of objects, persons,
gestures, actions, so that the Venetian blind in the house, the banana
plantation which surrounds the house, the woman A... combing her
hair, all are of equal status and require equal attention. An example is
A...’s combing her hair, the (quasi-scientific) description of which,
with its overabundance of “neutral”, even seemingly irrelevant
details, appears, in spite of the fact that it excludes subjectivity,
nevertheless highly subjective:

The brush descends the length of the loose hair with a faint noise
somewhere between the sound of a breath and a crackle. No sooner has it
reached the bottom than it quietly rises again toward the head, where the
whole surface of its bristles sinks in before gliding over the black mass
again. The brush is a bone-colored oval whose short handle disappears
almost entirely in the hand firmly gripping it. Half of the hair hangs down
the back, the other hand pulls the other half over one shoulder. The head
leans to the right, offering the hair more readily to the brush. Each time the
latter lands at the top of its cycle behind the nape of the neck, the head
leans farther to the right and then rises again with an effort, while the right
hand, holding the brush, moves away in the opposite direction. The left
hand, which loosely confines the hair between the wrist, the palm and the
fingers, releases it for a second and then closes on it again, gathering the
strands together with a firm, mechanical gesture, while the brush continues
its course to the extreme tips of hair (Jea 40-41).

Robbe-Grillet’s theoretical statements bestow a paradoxical


note on the relation between subject and object. On the one hand, he
demands from the reader: “let it be first of all by their presence that
objects and gestures establish themselves, and let this presence
continue to prevail over whatever explanatory theory that may try to
enclose them in a system of references [...]they will be there
afterwards, hard, unalterable, eternally present, mocking their own
‘meaning’” (1966, 21). On the other hand, he recognizes that seeing
means always “seeing as”, that it is intentional, is dependent on
concept-possession and concept-use, that it relies on a cognitive state
(supposing, hypothesizing) and an act of attention, as well as an
490 From Modernism to Postmodernism

underlying feeling, desire, and thought: “Man is present on every


page, in every line, in every word. Even if many objects are
presented and are described with great care, there is always and
especially the eye which sees them, the thought which reexamines
them, the passion which distorts them. The objects in our novels
never have a presence outside human perception, real or imaginary”
(New Novel 1964, 137). The author in fact relies on the material
surface to represent, both in relations of implication and
contradiction, the underlying general emotional cause, which is
jealousy, and the strained emotional condition of the
observer/husband who closely attends to the visual data in his wish
for enlightenment without expressis verbis mediating between
material, psychic condition and universal/ anthropological theme.
The gap and the indissoluble tension, indeed the clash,
between perception and thought gives rise to a chain of at least five
paradoxes: (1) The paranoid, jealous obsession is the unifying
psychological theme, but it is never overtly analyzed or even
mentioned; the emotion of jealousy, which is an emotion of crisis, is
based only upon the never quite verified belief of the
observer/husband that his wife and Frank are lovers. (2) Though the
whole scenario is designed to achieve a result, to clear up the facts
and discover the truth, it remains confined to the process of
observing, restricted to visual perception, extending only into
memories, hallucinations, projections, and thus foregoes closure,
which “normally” would be its aim. (3) This process in time
paradoxically dissolves time, both “objective” and “subjective” time,
the former by de-chronologizing the events, the latter by de-
emotionalizing the objects and reifying space. Robbe-Grillet says
that time in his texts “seems to be cut off from its temporality. It no
longer passes. It no longer completes anything” (155, 22). The result
is the creation of a “closed” space. (4) The readers after their first
disorientation take the subject’s feeling of jealousy as a (justified)
fact, even though the expected emotion (which points to the void
behind the surface) can only be sensed by perceiving the surface. The
concentration on the hard surface suggests a state of isolation that
calls for a cause, which is taken to be jealousy. The text that is
ultimately about emotion does not represent emotion and is yet
received in terms of emotion. (5) But the scale of response is
different for the experiencing subject in the text from that of the
Character 491

recipient who reads the text. The figurations of perception for the
perceiving subject in the text constitute both an open and a “closed”
space (open because no clarifying results are achieved by
observation, closed because the jealous husband is unable to detach
himself from the scenario and his feelings). For the reader there
opens a wide space of reactions that extends from the hard surface of
what is perceived to the suppositions of the perceiving subject in the
text, i.e., jealousy, and beyond to further speculations of his or her
own, which may be radically separated from what is being seen and
articulated, and therefore, as it were, float in the void. In Robbe-
Grillet’s words: “according to the preoccupations of each reader, [the
text will] accommodate all kinds of comment — psychological,
psychiatric, religious or political — but its “indifference to these
potentialities will soon become apparent” (137).
The separateness of the world from, and its indifference to,
subjective projections, the emotions and thoughts of both the
husband and the reader, allow for a further, more radical
interpretation that is based upon what Wittgenstein says in the
Tractatus, namely that “[t]he subject does not belong to the world:
rather, it is a limit of the world” (5.632) and thus cannot be
“represented in language”. Concomitantly, later critics have seen
Robbe-Grillet’s texts in terms of what Foucault calls the “end of
subjectivity” (1970, 387), the repression of the subject by the
dominant role of the discourse. While the first phase of
(“phenomenological”) criticism, in connection with theoretical state-
ments in For A New Novel, emphasized the new “realism” in Robbe-
Grillet’s fiction, the second, structuralist, linguistic-formalist phase
of criticism, in a rhetorical turn, eliminates from its considerations
the role of the subject as center and origin and replaces it with
language as the fundamental dimension of the text, which “situates”
the subject.127 Yet these two, basically different approaches, the one
speaking of a new realism, the other of the dominance of discourse,
only make evident the whole dialectic, the indissoluble paradox of
narrative. On the one hand, language appears to work through and on
behalf of the consciousness of a private subject, and, on the other
hand, the (un)conscious intention of language expresses itself without
subject in an unending flow. What is interesting, however, is the fact
that it does not make much difference whether one places the subject
outside language as its generator or within language and its textual-
492 From Modernism to Postmodernism

linguistic system as, in Ricardou’s words, a mere “formal subject”.


Both subject and discourse establish as signified a situation with
space, time, subject, and action (or perception for action) as its
constituents, and thus organizes what is basic to all postmodern texts:
the balancing (or the disruption) of the subject-object-language-
relation or, for that matter, the language-object- subject-relation.
In addition to (1) the dialectic of subject versus language, the
text exemplifies three other fundamental dichotomies of postmodern
fiction, (2) the dialectic of abstraction versus concreteness, the
radical concreteness of the surface turning into abstraction of
relations and vice versa; their lack of synthesis makes the text
unstable and undecipherable; (3) the dialectic of the animate versus
the inanimate, the animate and dynamic, here emotion and desire,
both dissolving into the inanimate; and (4) the dialectic of absence
versus presence, the text’s making evident that the character/-
narrator’s focalization on the surface, the physical world, activates
almost automatically a psychological code — an insight that
Hemingway already took advantage of with his “iceberg-technique”,
and that the postmodern novel exploits to the extreme. All four
contradictions of opposites together establish the fantastic mode that
deconstructs the “proper”, “normal”, and “used-to”, decomposes the
unity of time, space and character, explores the alien and repressed,
concerns itself with gaps and absences, traces the unsaid and unseen
and sets signifiers against signifieds. The methods applied to
fantasize the world are different, but they all create a state of
incongruity. They turn the dynamic into the static and mobility into
immobility (Beckett’s and Robbe-Grillet’s method) or, conversely,
transform the static into the dynamic, immobility into mobility
(Burroughs’s strategy in the following example). They separate
subject matter and discourse, situation and language (Borges,
Sorrentino, Barthelme). The result is the already quoted
“fundamental vagueness”, of which Borges speaks (Ficciones, 1962,
19).

7.11.3. Implosion of the Exterior: William Burroughs, Naked


Lunch

One can reify the surface and its composition and freeze the
distance between object and observer, or one can set things in motion
Character 493

and dissolve the distance between subject and object, in fact make
the subject the object in a process of metamorphoses. William
Burroughs follows the latter strategy in Naked Lunch. He writes that
“there is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of
his senses at the moment of writing ... I am a recording instrument. ...
I do not presume to impose ‘story’ ‘plot’ ‘continuity.’ ... Insofar as I
succeed in direct recording of certain areas of psychic process” (NL
221, Burroughs’s ellipses). Though Burroughs does not impose a
coherent “story, plot” on “what is in front of his senses”, he shapes
very well what he sees, hears, feels, or rather he creates it in terms of
the imagination, as a fantastic transformation of inorganic and
organic matters. They come to dominate and permeate the human
body, so that the mind indeed acts as a passive recording instrument
of the movements of the body and its interpenetrations with other
bodies and matter. The central organizing principle being montage,
the book creates blocks of association, which — as “everything is
free to enter or to go out” — are connected either by the movement
of the “I” through space and time or by the movement of things,
persons, races through the “I”, whose body becomes permeable.
While in Robbe-Grillet’s book, desire is twice removed from the
surface (things, jealousy, desire to know and act), in Naked Lunch
desire turns into pure energy, becomes the driving force that fires the
imagination; it is the desire to escape. Sensual experiences driven by
desire produce feelings of joy, wonder, and even “convulsions of
lust” at the sense of freedom, of liberation from the limitation of time
and space and the controls of a terroristic universe — a sense of
freedom that is, however, an illusion, the effect of drugs. The
following passage comes from the description of the “City of
Interzone in state of Yage intoxication”:

Notes from Yage state: Images fall slow and silent like snow ... Serenity ...
All defences fall ... everything is free to enter or to go out ... Fear is simply
impossible ... A beautiful blue substance flows into me ... I see an archaic
grinning face like South Pacific Mask ... The face is blue purple splotched
with gold ... The room takes on aspect of Near East whorehouse with blue
walls and red tasseled lamps ... I feel myself turning into a Negress, the
black color silently invading my flesh ... Convulsions of lust ... My legs
take on a well rounded Polynesian substance ... Everything stirs with a
writhing furtive life ... The room is Near East, Negro South Pacific, in
some familiar place I cannot locate ... Yage is space-time travel ... The
room seems to shake and vibrate with motion ... The blood and substance
494 From Modernism to Postmodernism

of many races, Negro, Polynesian, Mountain, Mongol, Desert Nomad,


Polyglot Near East, Indian races as yet unconceived and unborn, passes
through the body ... Migrations, incredible journeys through deserts and
jungles and mountains (stasis and death in closed mountain valley where
plants grow out of genitals, vast crustaceans hatch inside and break the
shell of body) across the Pacific in an outrigger canoe to Easter Island (NL
109-110).

The surface is here, in contrast to Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy,


the representation of pure energy; desire and the satisfaction of desire
fuse into one. While in Jealousy desire “waited”, in a way passively
without direct expression, behind the emotion of jealousy, Naked
Lunch places emotions both side by side and behind the desire.
Behind the desire of freedom and the corresponding feeling of joy
emerges quite another emotion, a feeling of pain, fear, and despair
concentrating on the void beneath the psychic state of intoxication.
While perception in Jealousy registers order, though below order
lurks order-breaking force, we see in Naked Lunch the direct
workings of force in the form of dreamlike images in fantastic
situations that emerge from the unconscious and deny interpretation.
They escape categorization by radical metamorphosis that penetrates
the dividing lines between the inanimate and the animate, turns into a
radical mobility of particles, bodies, distances. People and things
constantly metamorphose into one another without giving pause for
the expression of emotion and thought. In these dreamlike,
kaleidoscopic scenes, emotion can only be expressed by the “random
craving of images”, a device that the text makes use of to attain rapid
shifts of positions, displacements, superimpositions, expansions, and
contractions of fluid space, the change of nearness into distantness,
and vice versa. What is behind these continuous imaginary
movements through space is the “nightmare fear of stasis” (qtd. in
Tanner 1966, 550-51). In Naked Lunch, force (of movement and
metamorphosis) is set against threatening order of a “terroristic
universe”, quite in the spirit of Deleuze who said that when the
combinations of flux and becoming disrupt the planes of consistency,
“[a] thing, an animal, a person are now only definable by movements
and rests, speeds and slownesses (longitude) [...] Nothing develops,
but things arrive late or in advance, and enter into some assemblage
according to their compositions of speed. Nothing becomes sub-
jective but hecceities take shape according to the compositions of
non-subjective powers and effects” (Deleuze and Parnet 93), here
Character 495

desire and fear. The world that comes into existence, however, is
multidimensional; it is fantastic, bizarre, grotesque. Imaginative
transformations of the world stand side by side the satirical
denunciation of society and the fear of a terroristic universe, as well
as a warning against the drugs that were originally the generators of
the flights of the imagination, of movement and metamorphosis.

7.12. Reflection and Fiction

Human consciousness entails both freedom and bondage,


isolation and communication. Reflection and imagination (and
perception, emotion and desire) are functions of consciousness; they
participate in the creation of its structure, which is act-like in its
outer- and inner-directedness. Subject and object form the unity of
consciousness and are its two aspects. The individual has the world
present in consciousness; he or she possesses and defines his or her
world and his or her consciousness. Everyone has consciousness;
communication with others is possible because, when a human being
is conscious of the world, that consciousness, by the possession and
use of common concepts, is something individual and general at the
same time. In the network of the mind’s capacities, reflection is
cognitive, intentional, and functional. The structure of reflection is
defined by the fact that reflection is an intellectual activity, which
produces insights by first setting differences and at the same time,
successively, uniting the parts by synthesis.
As to its content and intention, reflection is a cluster-concept
and as such ambiguous. It is positive or negative, distinguishes or
mediates, refers to the actual and the potential, turns “horizontally” to
the object and the self, “vertically” to the history of culture and the
subject’s past, concerns itself with the norms of the superego or the
drives of the id or the problematic situation of the ego as mediator. It
fills consciousness and is a partner of memory and imagination. The
state of its “being” and its functioning, however, raises questions that
wait for clarification and leave beyond all rational explanation an
“explanatory gap” (Levine 89), so do its cultural construction and its
anthropological or idealistic universalism, its phenomenal
determination or self-orientation. Verifiable answers to the questions
of how consciousness, its activities and their interrelating function
appear to be impossible to postmodern writers. One of the most self-
496 From Modernism to Postmodernism

reflexive and philosophically oriented authors, William Gass, in the


words of the historian Kohler from The Tunnel, takes refuge in
metaphors: the “character of consciousness itself” is

empty, of course, thus universal, thus potential, like that of the unborn, or
a monster without the electricity of life, or the maiden asleep, waiting to be
energized, lived in, filled, a volume; yes, no wonder it ought not to be let
out, diluted by things already made, felt, thought, imagined, desired —
dragged about, disgraced, defiled, deformed — for it was inwardness
without anything in it, without any outside having crept like a wounded
animal into its den to hide, perhaps to heal there, a world of material mess
and misery, not yet royally imagined, not yet made more than merely into
mind (Tun 590-91).

The explanatory gap that shields consciousness itself from


conceptualization, though its own activity is a constant attempt at
conceptualization, has become wider in postmodern fiction; it in fact
has swallowed up motivations and rationalisms of the traditional and
even modern kind. Yet though we cannot “explain” consciousness
and the interaction of its faculties to any satisfactory degree as
wholeness, we might differentiate three dimensions of reflection.
(1) After consciousness has taken notice of things,
circumstances, situations, events, etc., it can, so to speak, step back
and reflect on certain fundamental relationships that exist between
the manifold objects and circumstances and the mind’s notions of
them and can ascertain sameness or identity here, diversity and
dissimilarity there, and contrast or opposition elsewhere. Notions of
objects and relations become notions of reflection. The reflective
regard oversees the differentiation and coherence of objects and their
combinations within larger discourses, establishes hierarchies and
different levels of causal efficacy. After Kant’s denial of the
possibility of perceiving the “thing-in-itself” and rejection of
grounding the categories of understanding in the objectivity of nature
or a metaphysical instance, the position of reflection changed. Based
on the spatial-temporal synthesis of the sensory experience, the
reflective powers of consciousness and their categories (which
appear in Kant with a certain unexplained automatism and spon-
taneity) are seen to constitute the world. They signify, pointing to the
world according to a combination of progressive logical steps,
without, however, eliminating the possibility of objectively
apprehending objects and values and the parallel rationalism of, and
Character 497

affinity between, patterns inherent in nature and consciousness. This


is so even though nature’s determinations are not in all respects
transparent to the human mind and even though the power of
reflection exhausts itself in the process of understanding. The
structure of consciousness is fundamentally designative and
intentional; it is a system of classifications that does not aim at nature
but at forming a habit of mental synthesis, a pattern of orientation;
and this system sets the course for a further loosening of the bonds
between consciousness and nature and a shifting of the balance
towards consciousness, away from the world and nature.
This has consequences for the creation of fictional worlds.
The shift of emphasis toward consciousness generates at least four
changes. First, consciousness and the world are separated. As a result
of this separation, the perception of, and reflection about, objects and
places, so important in the nineteenth-century “realistic” novel, can
be reified into forms of extreme exterioralism that suppress the
relations among the constituents of the situation (space, time,
character, action/event), impede the progressive logical steps of
apprehending the world, and complicate emotional investment in the
spatio-temporal syntheses that give the narrated situation its profile
(Robbe-Grillet, Jealousy). Second, conversely, not an actual,
exterior, spatio-temporal world but rather the independent
creativeness of consciousness may be foregrounded. This has two
results: (a) “consciousness invents its own objects and no longer
needs to depend on the limitations of external reference” (Tun 412);
(b) even though consciousness creates its own field of perception,
which is freely fashioned with imaginary data and relations, it
establishes nevertheless an “as-if” parallelism between consciousness
and nature, following in principle Vaihinger’s famous, ground-
breaking extension and radicalization of Kant’s argument (that the
“thing-in-itself” cannot be grasped by consciousness) in his The
Philosophy of “As-if”.Barth, for instance, explores the as-if position,
namely that not only reality is fiction but also fiction is reality, in
“Menelaiad” (Menelaus, reduced to a voice, functions as a kind of
as-if character) and “Anonymiad” (the marooned bard creates a
fictional world “as-if” it were real). Sorrentino in Mulligan Stew
slightly changes the as-if scenario by having Halpin and Beaumont
describe the “odd” house they inhabit — where “a staircase leads
‘nowhere’” and “disappears into empty space” — as if it were a
498 From Modernism to Postmodernism

“normal” house, in spite of the fact that Halpin speculates without


further ado about the possibility “that if we walked into this haziness,
we would walk somehow into another dimension” (MS 30). Third,
Kant’s categories of consciousness — and more so the construction
of the world under the premise of an as-if parallelism between nature
and consciousness promoted by Vaihinger — take on the character of
languages of consciousness rather than categories of being. This and
Wittgenstein’s idea that only language games can be understood and
analyzed while reality hides itself behind the linguistic veil can lead
to two results. Either the concretization of space, time, character, or
action becomes atrophied into mere lists of words, which undermine
the situationally structured context that proceeds from the assumption
of interrelated constituents (e.g., Barthelme, Gass, Elkin, Sorrentino),
or the concretization of a narrated situation is not even seriously
attempted; it is drowned in a flow of verbiage that makes the veil of
language impenetrable (again, Barthelme, Sorrentino). And fourth,
resignation gains ground with regard to an existentially meaningful
relationship with the world. The ultimate consequence then is
silence. In The Tunnel Gass formulates elegantly and wittily some of
the relativistic positions that obstruct confidence in the human
potential to make sense: “There are no goals, and only errant ways”
and “Few ends, yet many means”, or “There is an insufficient reason
for everything” (418-19, 453). Such doubts in the concepts of
purpose and meaning, “reality” and “truth”, and in the possibility of a
clarifying relation between consciousness and the world, would lead
“a thinker of real thoughts”, to “think only about the evanescent, and
the character and condition of consciousness; because I know that is
all I am, even if I feel I am standing in my living-room [...] sur-
rounded by a world wide as the world is, and that world oceaned in
space, as alone in its orbit as I am in mine, however minor mine is”
(Tun 467).
(2) The opaqueness of the world, resulting from the inability
of consciousness to free itself from its own restrictions and to
penetrate the veil of language, leads to a concentration of
consciousness on consciousness, on the psychological subject (and
the linguistic system); and this has consequences. When reflection
directs itself not to the objects of the world “outside” but to the inner
world, the subject becomes self-conscious. The outer sense as
stimulation of consciousness is balanced by a sentiment of the self,
Character 499

either of its power or its problems or both. By making the subject the
object of consideration and thus by constituting a new self-reflecting
subject, reflection distances consciousness and consciousness of the
world from the self, a state of mind of which the self in reflection
then becomes aware. Depending on the philosophical system, the
formation, function, and value of self-consciousness are of course
conceived differently. At the one pole is the idealistic notion of self-
consciousness, at the other, its pragmatic understanding. Hegel is
representative for the former, and Dewey is here taken for the latter.
The idealistic stance has a universalistic frame of reference in the
absoluteness of the Spirit to which reflection turns; the pragmatic
position takes its viewpoint in the lifeworld, in the practical
decisions and their problems. With Hegel the productivities of human
reflection and self-reflection are not in themselves sufficient to
ensure their ultimate value; reflection, the process of knowledge,
manifests itself as insight, not in the illumination of limited objects
and operations, but in a self-transcending reflection that is aware
(even though only obscurely) of the final and convergent direction of
all conscious acts towards Self-knowledge and Self-identity, which
coincides on the whole, and in each of its stages with the ultimate
reality it defines, which is that of the absolute Spirit. Consciousness

has risen to a religion for which the active universality, the Spirit which
informs the teleology of nature and history, is also felt and pictured as a
principle which achieves self-consciousness in a paradigmatic man, and,
through the Spirit there present, in all men. What will now be achieved is
das absolute Wissen, the perfect knowledge only consummated in
philosophy [...]. For absolute knowledge is simply the realization that all
forms of objectivity are identical with those essential to the thinking
subject, so that in construing the world conceptually it is seeing everything
in the form of the self, the self being simply the ever-active principle of
conceptual universality, of categorical synthesis. In its conceptual grasp of
objects it necessarily grasps what it itself is, and in grasping itself it
necessarily grasps every phase of objectivity (Findlay xxviii).

While with Hegel the ultimate formal goal of consciousness,


self-reflection and self-knowledge, define the human being in its
essence, not its relations to the pragmatic world, with John Dewey it
is the reverse. Reflection is not axiomatically concentrated in itself as
a protection against the contingencies and vagaries of the world, and
at the same time disengaged from the self as the absolute, self-
reflecting Spirit, but rather it is first of all practical thought related to
500 From Modernism to Postmodernism

the praxis of life. According to pragmatism, the life praxis is


dominated by action as the fundamental anthropological category,
and reflection is defined in relation to action. For Dewey “[t]he life
of reflection is therefore secondary to the life of action” (101).
Reflection comes only to the fore in problematic situations that
impede action, and its task is to solve the problem. Yet, in addition to
this merely instrumental concept of reflection, there is, surprisingly,
another kind of reflection that answers to the “total problematic
situation” of human existence (225). The “breakdown of habit” (99)
turns into a total problematization of self-identity, which causes the
loss of domination over the situation and as a consequence leads to
self-alienation. But this loss of the fixities of thought can also create
space for liberated self-reflection, the chance for the subject to come
to itself in the act of reflection: “In this kind of thinking we discover
the character of personality. No longer does ‘it’ think, but ‘I’ think”
(48). Reflection is thus also in Dewey’s pragmatism the necessary
medium for the constitution of the self; and the divergence, rather
than the convergence of the self and the situation, establishes self-
knowledge and self-identity: “And in part personality is the measure
of resistance. I know myself as a ‘self’ by the obstacles I encounter.
If ideas met no resistance in their embodiment in action, but were [...]
immediate and instantaneous realizations, reflection would have no
use and personality would have no existence” (50).
From Hegel to Dewey, from idealism to pragmatism to
modernism and postmodernism, resistance against the limitations
and contingencies of the world is the basis for the conceptualization
of (self)reflection. It is in fact the basis for a humanistic
understanding of the self since Descartes’s “cogito ergo sum”, who,
however, did not focus on the (problems of the) self, which was only
“filled out” as the central entity of consciousness by Kant, the
Romantics, and the modernist writers, with or without denial of the
dominance of the rational logic of thought. In the modernist,
internalized novel, self-consciousness is cherished and sought for as
the generator of self-knowledge and at the same time dreaded and
faced with anxiety as the source of uncertainty, pain, and despair.
The alienating effects of self-consciousness make the character
conscious of the self-confining prison-house effect of self-
knowledge, the fact that character-consciousness presupposes and
cannot leave consciousness and knowledge. Radical self-questioning
Character 501

limits the choices in the world, makes it difficult if not impossible to


“live a life of clichés” (Elkin, in LeClair and McCaffery 117), resists
the idea “that the exceptional life — the only great life — is the trite
life” (Elkin, in LeClair and McCaffery 117), and has extreme
difficulties in accepting the self and the external world
unconditionally as sources of meaning without further enquiries into,
and doubts about, what meaning is.
Postmodernist writers now turn the tables; they empty the
rational logic of thought as well as the existential logic of pain, and
they reject the factual logic of the “real”. With this last step, the
blurring of the difference between reality and fiction, the expansion
of negativity finally turns into positivity. Since the
conceptualizations of reality and the unified self are revealed as
fictions, the need to inquire into the status and meaning of reality and
truth, to negate deceptions, clichés and fixed ideologies, to establish
unity and authenticity of the self and at the end painfully to face
failure in all instances, disappears, at least in theory, even if in praxis
the longing for old unities continues to loom in the background and
to color the narrative argument. Reflection and language, now
separated from the identity-search of the self and from the “reality”
and truth problems that the world used to pose, team up with the
creative imagination in accepting the world as it is, or freely
recreating it. A synthesis of mental activities is created that resists
meaning as well as meaninglessness, but also powerlessness. The
result is a self-liberating attitude that finds expression in what one
might call humor, or rather, the comic mode, which re-orients the
world and turns powerlessness into power (this will be an issue in the
last chapter). Elkin, using the term modern in a rather wide sense,
notes: “It seems to me that there is only one modern joke: the joke of
powerlessness. [...] The grand jokes of A Bad Man or The Dick
Gibson Show — whatever I’ve written — are the jokes where the
character in trouble, confronted with a force much stronger than he
is, mumbles under his breath something that is absolutely devastating
to the authority which threatens him. But the fact that he has to
mumble it under his breath, you see, is what makes it funny”
(LeClair and McCaffery 115). Humor and the comic mode call for
energy under pressure, which is what Elkin, for instance, claims for
his characters. He says of Boswell: “I like him because he has the
energy of ego” (LeClair and McCaffery 120).
502 From Modernism to Postmodernism

(3) In its third dimension, reflection fully comes into its own
by reflecting about itself as reflection. In a philosophical turn, it
seeks to clarify the preconditions and consequences of forms of
sensibility, of the deduction of categories, of the structure of
consciousness. It reflects about the questions of truth, value, and
freedom, the attribution of certain kinds of ideas to certain faculties
of consciousness (metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics). The reflective
activity, in Gass’s words from the Tunnel, proceeds “from things to
thoughts of things, from thoughts of things to thoughts of thoughts”
(253), facing ultimately “one’s arena of empty awareness” (312).
Reflection thus becomes infinitely regressive and many-layered by
reflecting on the reflection on cognitive acts and further reflecting on
the reflection on the reflection on cognitive acts, etc. Active doubt
leads to ever further questionings of the preconditions of what was
reflected upon before, and consciousness experiences its limits, the
impossibility of knowing consciousness. Consciousness as object of
interrogation is seen to have always existed before consciousness as
subject of questioning; the latter has to undertake its examination in
the pre-established categories of the consciousness that it reflects
upon. This circling activity of consciousness is unsatisfactory, even
unacceptable for the will to know because it makes evident the limit
of human freedom; it restimulates the kinds of feeling and desire that
transcendental reflection is meant to quieten, the feeling of
frustration about the gaps of knowledge and the desire (turning
obsessive) nevertheless to transgress the limits, to be free, a yearning
that of course fails to attain its goal as long as reflection is focused on
the self and on its autonomy as subject, as it is in some types of
modern (and sometimes in postmodern) literature. The self-liberating
force is not the existential self-questioning but the transgression of
the limitations of the “real” and the self by the imagination. The
created imaginary, however, is now double-poled. It creates and
reflects on what it creates. The meta-reflection on art in postmodern
fiction proceeds along the same course as does reflection in general.
It advances from the artifact to the thought about the artifact to the
thought about the thought about the artifact, etc., to the point where
thought again encounters the limits of cognition, innovation, and
perfection but can react to it with the freely tilting spirit of the comic
mode that defuses contradictions and antinomies with the élan of
play.
Character 503

Reflection of course functions differently in philosophy than


in narrative, though there is “a similarity — an analogy” (Gass 1996,
133). Philosophy strives for clarity and logical order and analyzes
rigorously and comprehensively the workings of consciousness and
its relations to the exterior world. Fiction, especially postmodern
fiction, bases its concepts of consciousness and of the world on the
findings of philosophy in a more or less direct way. But, in addition,
it has to do its work in terms of the situational transformation of
meaning; in other words, it has to operate within the situational
context that the elements of space, time, character, action/event
establish. This means that reflection in fiction is not only a
theoretical but also a practical issue. Within the text it is part of the
“story” or reflection with a number of constituents: (1) a subject that
reflects; (2) an object it reflects upon; (3) the process of thinking; (4)
its result, the thought and the limits of thought; and (5) the aesthetic
form of thinking and thought. As we will see, emphasis can be laid
on the various aspects of reflection to the detriment of others (though
none can be fully deleted since they form together the “structure” of
reflection in fiction). The motivation, starting-point, and non-
transgressable limit of all transcendental reflection is the abyss and
the void below the known. In Kohler’s words from The Tunnel:
“beneath the surface of life [and, one might add, narrative] is the pit,
the abyss, the awful truth, a truth that cannot be lived with, that
cannot be abided: human worthlessness” (197). Hawkes says: “John
Barth’s fiction has the enormous power it does partly because it is
always positing nothingness, because it is so ‘created’ that it also
insists on that which is vacant. To me this is frightening. [...] Out of
the nothingness that is our context you create the fabulous” (LeClair
and McCaffery 15).
Since humans cannot abide to face the pit, the abyss, the
vacancy, they cover them. Neither thought nor the imaginary can
change the facts of life, but the synthesis of imagining and thinking
can fashion an aesthetic form of thought as a means of building a
surface or of filling the void, without losing sight of it. In much of
postmodern fiction, neither the subject nor the object of reflection is
emphasized, but the other three elements step into the foreground:
the act of reflection, the thought and the aesthetic form of the
thought. The act of reflection often points in two contrary directions,
the creation of difference and of synthesis, and the thoughts are
504 From Modernism to Postmodernism

arranged in a formal pattern that combines thesis and anti-thesis.


While modernist authors carry on the process of reflection with the
clearly marked intention of attaining a result, a manner of
understanding, or some kind of significance, and respond to the
failure of this enterprise with disillusionment and despair,
postmodern writers know that there is no ultimate knowledge, no
single truth, no discrete reality, no significant identity. While
modernists dramatize reflection by the dynamic tension between the
character’s lack of identity and its existential striving for it, for self-
knowledge, authenticity, meaning, i.e., by a dramatic tension within
character, postmodernist writers, having decentered the character-
play with plurisignification, multiperspective, contradictions, and
paradoxes as such, at least potentially independent of the interiority
of a character and its conflicts; in other words, they dramatize re-
flection as if it occurred more or less outside the character on a
matrix of ambiguities and contradictions.
Borges and Beckett are again, as so often, the forebears of
the postmodern American writers. For their pattern of reflection,
contradiction is the measure of truth. In the Tlön of Borges’s “Tlön,
Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, for instance, all “[w]orks [...] invariably
include both the thesis and the antithesis, the rigorous pro and con of
a doctrine. A book which does not contain its counterbook is
considered incomplete” (Lab 13). Borges and Beckett operate in their
texts with all imaginable variations of thesis-antithesis con-
figurations. Borges’s “The Library of Babel” confronts “everything”
with “nothing”. The Library that stands for the universe contains
every conceivable book, “all that is given to express, in all
languages” (Lab 54). Yet since the “total” book (54) is missing,
though it is continuously searched for because it might be
somewhere, the books “signify nothing” (53). In another paradoxical
move, Borges’s “A New Refutation of Time “ defines time in terms
of both the desperation and the consolation it causes, and makes
subject and object exchangeable:

Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical


universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny
[... ] is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible
and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which
Character 505

sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I
am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world,
unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges (Lab 233-34).

Though the imaginary and the reflexive acts often follow


different paths, namely those of construction and deconstruction,
imagination and reflection combine. This occurs when reflection
does not follow its own strict categories that according to Aristotle
invalidate contradictions, but rather construes reflexive formulas that
are contradictory and antithetical and thus are able to accommodate
the free rovings of the imagination. Activating its transformative,
transgressive, and emancipatory potential, the imaginative act of
reflection suspends conventional dualities like good-bad, true-false,
real-fictive, and replaces the strict either-or thinking of Western
civilization with an as-well-as attitude that fuses order and disorder,
reality and fiction, truth and untruth to a new, non-rational, open-
ended, fluid synthesis without closure that creates difference in the
process of dissemination. Thoughts begin to float, to shuttle back and
forth, and form their own designs. Without realigning themselves to
the integrating instance of the subject, they in fact take on the nature
of a model or gestalt of their own. Instead of forming a full “story” of
reflection that is centered in the self and interrelates subject and
object, other double-poled structures of the process of consciousness
come to the fore. Reflective act and rational result (or painful
disillusion), the opposition of thesis and antithesis, in fact form a
self-sufficient aesthetic gestalt that, in the fusion of reflection and
imagination, also fuses philosophy and fiction, epistemology and
hermeneutics, aesthetics and ethics. By emphasizing (non)relations
between contrasting thoughts and not so much their content, the
thinking process develops thought “situations” of its own, as in
Beckett’s texts.
In Beckett, the self is in a continuous, unsolvable, existential
crisis that is filled with words, questions, and non-answers or mani-
fold answers. They form a pattern that gains a status of in-
dependence. The subject might complain of it but cannot change it.
Molloy, for instance, muses: “what do I know now about them, now
when the icy words hail down upon me, the icy meanings, and the
world dies too, foully named. All I know is what the words know,
and the dead things [...] and truly it little matters what I say, this, this
or that or any other thing” (Moll 31- 32). Beckett has remarked:
506 From Modernism to Postmodernism

“there’s complete disintegration. No ‘I,’ no ‘have,’ no ‘being,’ no


nominative, no accusative, no verb. There’s no way to go on” (Bair
53, 400). Yet that is not quite true, as we know, because the
characters in his novels do in fact go on. Yet the goal of reflection is
no longer truth, probability, or credibility but the surface gestalt, or,
in Beckett’s phrase, the “shape” of reflection achieved through the
contrary arrangement of statements and positions:

I am interested in the shape of ideas even if I do not believe in them. There


is a wonderful sentence in Augustine. I wish I could remember the Latin. It
is even finer in Latin than in English! Do no despair; one of the thieves
was saved. Do not presume, one of the thieves was damned! That sentence
has a wonderful shape. It is the shape that matters (qtd. in O’Hara 1970,
18).

What matters is obviously the aestheticization of the


thinking-process between poles. The (masked) energies emerge in
the formed gestalt, a special shape of thought-patterns. Their
contradictions and fragmentations produce absences among them
that, though they are built into every signifying system, are here
emphasized by the hiatus between the figurations of thought. A
silence arises that “says” what cannot be incarnated in words, what is
outside the field of logic (and therefore also outside the system of
language). The inconceivable, what Wittgenstein calls “the
mystical”, gains space. Through the spaces in-between, re-enter
feelings and values that form no logically defensible propositions but
can only be represented in their “beyondness”, their being beyond
“the system” and its self-absorbing rational limits. The gaps allow
also the self, whose expressibility according to Wittgenstein is
beyond language, to participate in the reflection-process with its
existential (modern) problems of isolation and lack of identity. Barth,
Sorrentino, Sukenick, Federman, and others, make this thesis-
antithesis constellation and the production of gaps the structural basis
of much of their fiction. They set art against the reflection on art,
fiction against meta-reflection. In the process the one relativizes and
contradicts the other, and yet both form a new unity in multiplicity,
an aesthetic gestalt. Leaving behind the task of dramatizing the
character and the limits of the thinking self, the combination of
reflection and imagination strives towards a metalevel of “aesthetic
liberalism”, which recognizes no pre-established precepts or rules but
Character 507

attempts to reconcile the dualities by “transform[ing] the ceaseless


tensions between the various modes of modern discourse into the
conditions of possibility” (Cascardi 1992, 302). The counterstrategy
to the shaping of thoughts in contrasting patterns would be to
deconstruct these shapes of reflection in order to gain the shape of
the fragment or the mere contingent piece of thought hidden in a
stream of verbiage or in listings of imaginary “facts” (as in parts of
Barthelme’s Snow White, Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew, or Gass’s The
Tunnel). Barthelme has become famous for the remark of one of his
characters, who claims that “[f]ragments are the only forms I trust”
(UP 153), and Federman, Sukenick, Hawkes and Gass can be quoted
as making comparable statements.128
The de-emphasizing of both subject and object in favor of
the process of thinking and the aesthetic gestalts of thought implies
the risk of emptiness, of repetition, and exhaustion. Yet, as
mentioned before, none of the elements of reflection — subject,
object, thinking process, thought and (aesthetic) shape of thought —
can completely disappear because each one is a constitutive part of
reflection in fiction, and their (covered) interplay provides for
variations, tensions and ambiguities. The difference between the
postmodern writers can in fact be defined in terms of their different
approaches, the accentuation, and combination or suppression of the
varying elements of the reflexive process and its alignment with the
imagination. But even if reflection is suppressed, it shows ex
negativo, as “minus function” (Lotman), in the mood of the
characters, as is the case in Barthelme, whose texts gain their vitality
and ambiguity from this fact. The postmodern narratives analyzed in
the following sections exemplify the function of reflection as a
method of making or not-making sense, and as a thematic issue
whenever its creative power and resourcefulness is tested in com-
parison with other mental faculties or attitudes. In the analysis of six
texts, we will concentrate on those cases where, to quote the writer
Lamont from Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew, “[m]eaning is held in an
almost unbearable tension on the dizzying edge of the meaningless”
(47). A preliminary survey of the texts discussed may be helpful for
an assessment of the role of reflection in postmodern fiction.
(1) In its most radically self-oriented form and function,
reflection, confronting the self (or rather, the lack of a stable and
unique self), expands to fill the whole interiority of character. Its
508 From Modernism to Postmodernism

forms are contradiction and paradox, but its continuous process gives
the subject a presence and saves it from extinction. The price to be
paid is that reflection turns into a language-game with its own
gestalts, and that in fact the self and its language become identical.
Beckett is the obvious example. He has had an immense influence,
especially on American postmodern writers, and in his radicality and
transitory position between modernism and postmodernism, he offers
a touchstone for the employment of reflection in the American
postmodern novel. (2) In Coover’s The Public Burning, reflection is
for the main character, Vice President Nixon, the way to react to his
ambiguous experience of the world. It is a creative force and serves
to deconstruct the fixities and clichédness of the system of beliefs,
while the subject that reflects, Nixon himself, is satirized and
comicalized as the clownish representative of the system. (3) In
Barth’s “Menelaiad”, reflection and rationality lose their dominance
and structuring force in the struggle with emotion and mystery, in the
definition of the self. Barth pushes reflection to the limit of the
system (of logics, values, etc.) in a strategy of excess, extending the
scope of thought beyond its “natural” borderlines into the sphere of
love, but love wins, and Menelaus, the protagonist, has to announce
failure at the end (the beginning of the tale). (4) The limitation of the
role of reflection is visible not only with regard to love but also in the
attempt to solve an artist’s crisis of self-understanding, the crisis of
the imagination to perceive and to create. Sukenick’s story “The
Permanent Crisis” sets perception against reflection, and perception
wins. (5) In the system of human attitudes, reflection is the signum of
civilization; as a productive power it both supports and questions
beliefs and “truths” and thus keeps up a rational balance of various
necessities. Yet it may also represent the evil and the “fall” of
civilization; as a generator of complexities, of falseness, deception,
dividedness, it is set against innocence, the body, nature and religious
faith in an overall symbolization of human possibilities. Gass’s
Omensetter’s Luck demonstrates that the human lot is the fall from
innocence to experience, from living to reflecting about living. (6) In
fiction, reflection occurs as artistic self-reflexiveness. As such it can
choose two different routes. It either takes the form of meta-
reflection: the narrator/artist reflects about the strategies of narration
and the limits of traditional devices within the text, as in Barth. Or
the writing act, the narrative process itself, is understood as an act of
Character 509

self-reflexiveness, as in Federman. In all cases, whether reflection


succeeds or fails in extending the known, in providing a synthesis,
whether it is voiced by the character/narrator or turns into the self-
reflexiveness of the fictional process, the rational principle of
reflection (by coming to the limit of synthesis or failing at the limit),
paradoxically introduces and promotes a new synthesis that is not a
synthesis in terms of the rational and logical, but a disruptive syn-
thesis of the incommensurable that includes in that which is
presentable a “stronger sense of the unpresentable” (Lyotard 1984c,
81).

7.12.1. Grammatical Subject vs. Subject of Reflection: Beckett,


The Unnamable

It is as if Beckett made a passage from Kafka’s “The Great


Wall of China” his creative maxim: “The limits which my capacity
for thought imposes upon me are narrow enough, but the province to
be traversed here is infinite” (Kafka, Metamorphosis 1961, 81).
Beckett radicalizes to the extreme the literary tradition that reveals
the character consumed by self-analysis and its failure. Reflection in
this process is existentialized and de-existentialized at the same time.
This places Beckett’s trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, and The
Unnamable in a zone between modernism and postmodernism:
modernism because the self (reflecting about the possibility of
having a self) is the crucial target of reflection, postmodernism
because the self is multiplied and dissolved in the stream of
reflection that finally not only replaces the self but has to succumb to
language. In Molloy, which has two protagonists, the mirror selves of
Molloy and Moran, Moran wonders whether he has not “invented”
Molloy: “I mean found him ready-made in my head. There is no
doubt one sometimes meets with strangers, who are not entire
strangers, through their having played a part in certain cerebral reels”
(112). The logic of this process of wondering and reflecting while
writing must lead, in Hugh Kenner’s words, “to that limit where the
writing of the word now being written becomes its own subject. This
is what in fact happens in Malone Dies, the man in bed writing about
himself in bed writing” (79). The Unnamable, which has no definable
setting, no chronological time flow, no actions, and no recognizable
plot, is pure consciousness, i.e., reflection, carried on in the mono-
510 From Modernism to Postmodernism

logue of the unnamed protagonist. The latter establishes his textual


self, while the referential self almost disappears; and even the textual
self appears to fade away into the inexpressible. It is a “thinking
book”, “toying with parallels only to reject them, a self whose
simultaneity is so radical that all sense of componency vanishes and
‘I’ is left facing the silence that is itself, as what is said steps utterly
aside for what is shown and what is shown remains ineffable”
(Kawin 277). The “I” turns into the words it writes, and the words
turn out to be the “I” in an unending double-mirror effect that blurs
the borderlines between self and language but at the same time
makes this blurring of boundaries the object of reflection that cannot
be sure about anything but its own verbal consciousness and the
incessant movements of the mind. This self is compelled to think and
speak on and on and at the same time to register meticulously the
stream of thoughts and sentences and their failure to make sense.
Waking from sleep, the narrating “I” questions himself right away at
the beginning of the novel:

Where now? Who now? When now? Unquestioning. I, say I. Unbelieving.


Questions, hypotheses, call them that. Keep going, going on, call that
going, call that on. Can it be that one day, off it goes on, that one day I
simply stayed in, in where, instead of going out, in the old way, out to
spend day and night as far away as possible, it wasn’t far. Perhaps that is
how it began. You think you are simply resting, the better to act when the
time comes, or for no reason, and you soon find yourself powerless ever to
do anything again. No matter how it happened. It, say it, not knowing
what. Perhaps I simply assented at last to an old thing. But I did nothing. I
seem to speak, it is not I, about me, it is not about me. These few general
remarks to begin with. What am I to do, what shall I do, what should I do,
in my situation, how proceed. By aporia pure and simple? Or by
affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered, or sooner or later?
Generally speaking (293).

This is a pure case of possibility-thinking’s creating a design


of questions and answers in the modality of “perhaps”. All three
phases of ordering consciousness are abandoned or mutilated. The
“productive imagination” (Kant) has lost its image-producing
faculty; the causal processes of the mind are stopped or run empty;
the aesthetic judgment has no concepts and objects that might initiate
contemplations on the “faculty of form” and no “ideas” of
(metaphysical) infiniteness (Kant) or absoluteness of the Spirit
(Hegel) in which to rest self-reflection and satisfy the energies of the
Character 511

soul. What remains of the sublime is the infinite as formal principle,


reduced to the circling activity of reflection and its words; it rotates
around itself and the emptiness of the self. In the performance of a
continuous present tense, not bound by the past, by memory or by
“facts”, the “I, of whom I know nothing” (306) pushes on to ever-
new limits of apprehension, following its words in the vain hope to
find an entry to its true self, waiting for a language to express the
ineffable and for the silence to show himself the way so that he can
stop his saying:

he is made of silence, there’s a pretty analysis, he’s in the silence, he’s the
one to be sought, the one to be, the one to be spoken of, the one to speak,
but he can’t speak, then I could stop, I’d be he, I’d be the silence, I’d be
back in the silence, we’d be reunited, his story the story to be told, but he
has no story, he hasn’t been in story, it’s not certain, he’s in his own story,
unimaginable, unspeakable, that doesn’t matter, the attempt must be made,
in the old stories incomprehensibly mine, to find his, it must be there
somewhere, it must have been mine, before being his, I’ll recognise it, in
the end I’ll recognise it, the story of the silence that he never left, that I
should never have left, that I may never find again, that I may find again,
then it will be he, it will be I, it will be the place, the silence (417).

Wittgenstein’s notion that the self is the limit of the world


and that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world”
(Tractatus 1961, 5.6.) is here put into narrative, a narrative that has
mutated into reflection because the self cannot have and cannot find
a story that defines it. Barth will later turn the problem around in
“Menelaiad”, where Menelaus, continuously reflecting about love
and identity, seeks and finds a lot of stories but no self. The
Unnamable of course does not find the silence he is looking for; he
must go on, though he cannot and does not want to go on. The novel,
by emphasizing reflection for the presentation of the “I” and its
situation, dramatizes the limits of self-consciousness, but it ends with
a kind of dialogue between two selves that finally come together in
the awareness of possibilities and in the necessity to speak of them
and through them of the simultaneity of selves, in an unending, ever-
failing self-analysis and struggle with silence. The result, however, is
not a self of selves but the aesthetic gestalt of contradictory thoughts,
the “shape” that reflection and language together create in a new
synthesis. The synthesis paradoxically makes the “I” all-prominent as
the subject of sentences, but diminishes its weight as subject of
512 From Modernism to Postmodernism

existence and reflection in its own right in favor of linguistic patterns


that take on a thesis-antithesis gestalt, and have inscribed in it the
possibilities and impossibilities of thinking and writing the self.

[Y]ou must go on, I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on, you must say
words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me,
strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already,
perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the
threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would
surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I
don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go
on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on (418).

Beckett has perfected the method of addressing, in a


continuous monologic stream of language, a series of questions to the
self (in lieu of the missing occasion of genuine dialogue), and these
questions are more than rhetorical tools. Beckett claims that his art
has always been “pure interrogation, rhetorical question less the
rhetoric” (Disjecta 1983, 91); and Federman, who wrote his doctoral
dissertation on Beckett, notes that in the latter’s discourse of “self-
representation” the “shape will be an interrogation, and endless
interrogation of what it is doing while doing it” (1975, 11). Inter-
rogation, question, and paradox as strategies of reflection spread in
postmodern fiction, for instance in Barth, Pynchon and Gass; they
are the crucial strategies of self-analysis, for instance, in Coover’s
The Public Burning, Barth’s “Menelaiad”, or Pynchon’s The Crying
of Lot 49.

7.12.2. Reflection Against Belief: Robert Coover, The Public


Burning

In a way, the narrative process in The Public Burning


exemplifies what Vaihinger calls the “Law of Ideational Shifts” or
the “Law of the ‘transformation of ideas,’” which proposes “that a
number of ideas pass through various stages of development, namely
those of fiction, hypothesis and dogma and conversely dogma,
hypothesis and fiction”. While in this shift of positions one of them
dominates, the other two remain as the “tacit framework” (124, 128,
124, 17). In contrast to Beckett, Coover’s The Public Burning has a
context of social and historical beliefs and “dogmas” that, though it
partly operates in fantastic gestalts, is crucial to the book. The orien-
Character 513

tation of reflection towards the self thus functions within a wider


range of targets that refer to social values. The novel is about “the
relationship between man and his invented creations” (McCaffery
1982b, 29), i.e., the systems of belief, which are deconstructed in the
process of narrative and of reflection. The Rosenberg case, the
execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as Soviet spies on June 18th,
1953, is the historical subject of the book. There is a third-person
narrator, but the center of reflection is Vice President Nixon, who is
introduced into the novel as historical person and made to narrate the
unevenly numbered chapters of the book. Nixon is the creator of the
multiple perspective; he is both the confirmer and the doubter of the
system. He represents the views of the media, the institutions, and
power brokers, who turn all the familiar ideologies, myths, cliché
patterns, and stereotypes into the “constellation of enshrined ideas”
(161). This constellation of ideas and beliefs covers up the
contingency of history with masked ideology, for instance the idea of
the American Dream, which nevertheless is taken for the identity of
the people. Nixon believes in the American Dream not only as
something one dreams of, but out of personal experience (and, as
other statements show, out of the necessity of believing in
something): “I have the faith: I believe in the American dream, I
believe in it because I have seen it come true in my own life” (295).
In fact, the book shows, as Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow does, how
difficult if not impossible it is for a character to face the
consequences of the voidance of fixed centers; for “[r]aw data is
paralyzing, a nightmare, there’s too much of it and man’s mind is
quickly engulfed by it” (320).
Out of the book’s indictment of the American political and
social system evolve narrative strategies that fantasize the world. The
imagination’s power of image-making here runs parallel with the
analytical processes of the mind. They both disclose, denounce, and
deconstruct the closed system of references, deceptions, discourses.
For this purpose Coover, in a kind of “gigantism” (LeClair and
McCaffery 78) similar to that in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow,
makes use of multi-faceted, disruptive images, textual patterns,
metaphors, and allegorical figurations, in addition to facts, dates,
films, public occurrences, cultural events, in short, a range of
encyclopedic details that reveal the disorder behind order. The
narrative methods reject, ironize, and comicalize the corruption,
514 From Modernism to Postmodernism

incompetence, dullness, and banality of political leaders and public


figures, but also, and even more so, the simplicity of the public
conception of reality, the clichédness of political communication, and
the power of the media to form group-notions of reality. Not living
processes count, but fixed “form, form, that’s what it always comes
down to!” (91) and this form is untrue, corrupt, and dead. In a keen
attempt at comprehensiveness, Coover is “striving for a text that
would seem to have been written by the whole nation through all its
history, as though the sentences had been forming themselves all this
time, accumulating toward this experience” (LeClair and McCaffery
75-76). In the end, the “extravagant accretion of data suggests a
system” (191) that determines life but lacks force.
In its cooperation with reflection, the imagination goes
beyond the production of images. As a reflexive imagination, it
designs fantastic images/situations that indict the shallowness of
belief and thought as allegorical figurations. Personification of the
press is one of the means of this procedure. The press in The Public
Burning is the stabilizator and multiplicator of the closed ideological
system of beliefs. The power of the press is personified in the figure
of America’s Poet Laureate, TIME, who, like the journalistic
institution for which he stands, not only serves the public’s legitimate
need for information and analysis of information, but conversely
turns stereotyped beliefs into facts in “the vernacular wisdom of
God’s Own Country [...] motherhood, apple pie, old Uncle Tom’s
cabin and all” (Brendon 8). The New York Times, in a parody of
Hegel’s philosophical system and central idea, is presented as “The
Spirit of History” (188); it creates “a charter of moral and social
order” (191). Yet, as Julius Rosenberg clear-sightedly realizes, the
systemic thinking deadens life, “nothing living ever appears here at
all”; there is only “that vast, intricate, yet static tableau — The New
York Times’s finest creation — within which a reasonable and
orderly picture of life can unfold. No matter how crazy it is” (192).
The “keepers” of the Times shun chaos, “the terrible center, the
edgeless edge. [...] No breakaway wildness, no terrible conjurations”
(195), and devote themselves to ideological coverings of the void.
The “natural” process of attaining knowledge is thus reversed in
official America. It does not run from perception to reflection to
beliefs, but from (false) beliefs to predetermined perception without
reflection. The Times’s project is a “willful program for the stacking
Character 515

of perceptions” (191), and its result is the deadening of reflection by


belief, by ideology, which feeds on fixed belief and stifles the
spontaneity and dynamics of the perceiving and thinking processes.
The world-view of the Eisenhower era, which is seen to be
narrowly ideological, is mythologized on a meta-level into a fantastic
Manichaean struggle between Good and Bad, Light and Dark. The
combatants are impersonated. One is Uncle Sam, personified as a
Protean figure with clear-cut, healthy convictions representing the
American National Spirit, who mysteriously incarnates himself into
Presidents, in this case Eisenhower. The other is the Phantom, the
“Creator of Ambiguities” (336), Uncle Sam’s impersonalized and
immaterial, communistic counterpart who is said to strive for world
power and thus to cause global mischief. In its vagueness, however,
the Phantom is little more than an incarnation of “all what most
maddens and torments, [...] all the subtle vinimus demonism of life
and thought, that mysterious fearsome force [...] the darkness fearful
and formless” (335-36) that waits in the void. The Rosenbergs
remain insubstantial figures of the system, of its need for ratio-
nalization, dualistic structuring, and simplistic good-versus-evil
world-view. Because of the ideological fixities, the question of their
guilt or innocence cannot be given a careful consideration by the
people, the press, or the judges. The central spectacle, the theatrical
execution scene on Times Square, is fantasized into a huge circus
show, a ritual of civil religion that is not so much concerned with
justice and retribution, but serves rather as a substitute for “true”
religion and myth and provides an opportunity for role-playing (the
Rosenbergs playing their roles, too, “martyr roles they’d been
waiting for all along” [135]), for sham public communication, mass
identification, self-assertion, and, above all, public entertainment. In
fact everybody plays “phony roles” in this book.
The clue of the novel is that the character who affirms all
these clichés, indeed lives by stereotypes and owes all political
success to them alone, namely Richard Nixon, is the same person
who paradoxically liberates the reflection process, leads it back to its
true purpose, to judge and interrelate perceptions and beliefs, and,
finding them disconnected, to put the web of clichés in doubt and
deconstruct it. He at the same time demonstrates that new thinking
needs a new value-frame. If it is not society and its regulating forms,
the only alternative frame of reference available is Life and its force.
516 From Modernism to Postmodernism

Society and Life oppose and relativize one another. Coover places
Nixon in the “vibrant space between the poles” (LeClair and
McCaffery 72). The forms of society and the force of life suggest
contradictory versions of history and society that withstand any easy
configuration of synthesis. The book creates what Nixon sees as “a
space, a spooky artificial no-man’s land, between logical alter-
natives” (136), a space within which Nixon feels that he and Julius
Rosenberg “were more like mirror images of each other, familiar
opposites [...] He moved to the fringe as I moved to the center”
(137). Nixon in fact feels “a desire, much like theirs, to reach the
heart of things, to participate deeply in life” (128). In lieu of dialogic
communication for which there is no place in the novel, Coover
creates a strategy of monologic reflection that centers on questions
and a system of provisional answers that are again expressed in the
form of questions, indicating positions that are relativized the
moment they are uttered by counter-positions:

Were they [the protesters] all dupes? And the Rosenbergs? Who was
behind them? Were they really as transparent as they seemed? Or were
there strange patterns of depravity concealed behind the middle-class
clichés of their trial testimony [...]? All these questions: [...] Why did I
have to keep going back over this material, starting over, driving myself? I
felt caught up in some endless quest, a martyr to duty ... but duty to what?
My self perhaps, its creation and improvement, the need to show I had
what it takes, that I deserved, no matter what I got (297).

Nixon’s reflections turn more and more away from clichéd


thoughts towards perceptions of his own. They become the
counterforce to preformed social and political syntheses: “I stared
gloomily at the paper strewn across my office floor. Which was real,
I wondered, the paper or the people? [...] the zeal for pattern. For
story. And they’d been seduced by this. If they could say to hell with
History, they’d be home free. The poor damned fools” (305). Indeed,
“[w]ho was telling the truth, the Federal Bureau of Investigation or
two admitted Reds?” (368) “Maybe the case constructed against the
Rosenbergs had been a complete fabrication, beginning to end”
(369). Nixon “recognized that there was something wrong with this
black-and-white view” (373). Thinking about the reality of the
Rosenbergs, he realizes that the death sentence has changed them:
“what was striking about all their letters after that was the almost
total absence in them of concrete reality, of real-life involvement —
Character 517

it was all hyperbole, indignation, political cliché, abstraction” (305).


The Rosenberg case initiates in Nixon thoughts about himself and the
state of America in general that take on the form of the paradox. “My
trouble, I thought, is that I’m an introvert in an extrovert profession”
(331). As an introvert he is liable to think, while in an extrovert
profession he is liable not to think but to believe. And he
paradoxically not only complains about the fixedness of ideology
but, conversely also about the lack of form: “Ah, why did nothing in
America keep its shape, I wondered? Everything was so fluid,
nothing stayed the same, not even Uncle Sam” (334). As always in
postmodern fiction, it is not easy, in fact impossible, for the fictional
character to attain a place in the middle, though that is the only place
that could prevent the either-or attitude of a false ideological sense of
truth and could gain a humanizing synthesis of values. This middle
position is reserved for the author and narrator, for their irony and
comic mode.
In asking all these deconstructive (and contradictory)
questions, Nixon comes to the point where he faces arbitrariness,
fictitiousness, and the void as the true givens. He asks himself what
his political part is: “Was this to be my role? To urbanize the
countryside and bring the wilderness back to the cities? To lead the
New Revolution? To bring the suburb to all America?” (373) In all
this he feels an “emptiness [...] so profound it was nearly a vacuum”
(339), the reason being that, as he phrases it, “I believed. I thought”
(346). This is exactly the paradoxical, self-questioning, “unhealthy”
combination of contradictory attitudes he falls victim to: believe and
think. His thinking in general and the critique of the system in
particular waver between clichés and genuine inner disturbance and
lead directly towards the instability of possibility-thinking: “The real
crisis of America today, I thought sullenly, is the crisis of the spirit”
(348); and “everything seemed double-edged” (359), “anything could
happen. Or nothing” (360). But the reasserting spirit still comes back:
“I believed in the American ideal of trying to do my best, trying
harder, wanting to do good in the world, to build a structure of
peace!” (361) Then again there are doubts, for “[i]t was as though
we’d all been given parts to play decades ago and were still acting
them out on ever-widening stages” (361). In a self-deconstructing
process of reflection, possibilities multiply in a Beckettian manner. It
might even be possible “[t]hat there was no author, no director, and
518 From Modernism to Postmodernism

the audience had no memories — they got reinvented every day! I’d
thought: perhaps there is not even a War between the Sons of Light
and the Sons of Darkness! Perhaps we are all pretending!” (362)
Consequently “what was History to me?” The atom bomb was
“something like a hole in the spirit. The motive vacuum” (363), the
void. The “truth for the world at large to gape at” is “that nothing is
predictable, anything can happen” (365). Behind the consistency of
fixed form appears as an alternative the disruptive force of
multiplicity and change; both form and force are bound to the
character’s consciousness, but they at the same time appear as
(abstract) positions, disengaged from the features of an individual
character that is not only itself but also the habitat of different views
and their power and struggle:
what emptiness lay behind the so-called issues. It all served to confirm an
old belief of mine: that all men contain all views, right and left, theistic
and atheistic, legalistic and anarchical, monadic and pluralistic; and only
an artificial — call it political — commitment to consistency makes them
hold steadfast to singular positions. Yet why be consistent if the universe
wasn‘t? In a lawless universe, there was a certain power in consistency, of
course — but there was also power in disruption! (363)

The questions that Nixon feels the need to raise and ponder
expose him, like many other postmodern protagonists, to a labyrinth
of signs, clues, and messages, and make him feel “like [he’d] fallen
into a river and was getting swept helplessly along” (334). They are
the important questions for the postmodern novel in general; they
turn from self-reflection to acts of transcendental reflection and back
to questions about the role of the self in the world, referring in the
process to the dialectics of power versus freedom (resistance), role
versus self, surface versus essence, reality versus fiction. Nixon
expresses disquietude at the possibility that the system of differences
is getting exhausted, that the contrasting poles of dualistic thinking
might be leveled and thus the ability of orientation disappear. This
brings him to consider a further possibility. He ponders the idea that
human belief-systems may have attained an independent existence as
ontological verities that are needed, cannot be changed, and have
come to attain an (abstract) reality of their own.
This again motivates him to go a step further. He changes the
viewpoint and attempts to make himself independent of the social
value-system, a move which heightens the tension between the
Character 519

reflecting subject and his beliefs. At the high point of the book, the
clownish figure of the Vice-President who incorporates the social
problems and ideological answers of the time — the fear of
communism, angst and hysteria, and the need for scape-goats — and
who is characterized by idiosyncrasies of thought and behavior, a
lack of communication with his environment, a misunderstanding of
people and events, who is struck with megalomania and paranoia,
finally reflects about understanding, sympathy, and love, sets Life
and Love against Society and Morals. In order to dramatize the direct
confrontation of the value points, Love and Morals, and to guarantee
the plurisignification of this encounter, Coover constructs an
extreme, fantastic situation, a meeting between Nixon and Ethel
Rosenberg. In one of the most bizarre and most comical situations of
the book, Nixon tries to make love to Ethel Rosenberg in the prison
and is then magically transported onto the stage of the execution in
Times Square, with his pants down. Under these fantastic circum-
stances, Nixon addresses Ethel with his new insight, his realization
that the central values are Life and Love; grabbing the prisoner in her
death cell, a few minutes before her execution, he says:

“We’ve both been victims of the same lie, Ethel! There is no purpose,
there are no causes, all that’s just stuff we make up to hold the goddam
world together — all we’ve really got is what we have right here and now:
being alive! Don’t throw it away, Ethel!” (436)

The depiction of the love scene is full of irony. Reflection ironizes


action, just as action ironizes reflection, and both are comicalized by
the perception of their simultaneity:

I felt I’d reached some new plateau of awareness, of consciousness, things


would never be the same again, for me or for anyone else — how glad I
was I’d come here! I jerked her hard into my body [...] I was out of my
mind with the ecstasy of it! My head was full of poems and justice and
unbelievable end runs. I saw millions of people running to embrace me. I
thought: I am making history this evening, not for myself alone, but for all
the ages! (439)

The sweet salt of tears mingled with the now-familiar taste of our lips. I
thought: all strength lies in giving, not taking. I wanted to serve. We held
each other’s hands. In this long chaste embrace, I felt an incredible new
power, a new freedom. Where did it come from? Uncle Sam? The
Phantom? Both at once? From neither, I supposed. There was nothing
overhead any more, I had escaped them both! I was outside guarded time!
520 From Modernism to Postmodernism

I was my own man at last! I felt like shouting for joy! [...] People are
always sweating about their image instead of about loving other people.
Why can’t we all talk to each other, just say what we feel?” (442-43)

In this scene, which runs over a number of pages, Coover


presents an entangled combination of genuine feelings, clichés, and
ridiculous thoughts, of love and caring and egotistical self-enclosure,
of serious endeavor and comic result. This conjunction of opposites
is not only the key to Nixon’s idiosyncratic character; it also says
something about Coover’s method of employing and dramatizing the
discourse of reflection. Dramatic tensions are achieved by creating
incongruencies among the elements that form the structure of
reflection. The clownish subject Nixon is set against the genuineness
of his thoughts; these sincere thoughts appear against the backdrop of
the clichéd beliefs and corrupt hypocrisies that he continues to
harbor. Nixon’s obviously personal, spontaneous acts of thinking at
the same time review systematically all the central questions that
postmodernism has to pose. In a hilarious synthesis of opposites, this
crafty and reckless power-broker within the system appears as a
postmodern questioner of the basic traditional beliefs, arguing from
outside the system. And, finally, there is the utter incongruence of a
love affair between the American Vice President and the doomed
Ethel Rosenberg — heightened in its discrepancy by the ill-suited
place and time that Nixon singles out for his sexual approach and the
expression of his love, the prison cell a few minutes before her
execution. This scene points to a general postmodern disparity, the
contrast between genuine feeling and thought and their (false)
discourses, which are ironized. Life and Love are incorruptible
realities in postmodern fiction, but they do not escape fixation and
corruption through language and thought. This makes possible
Coover’s double strategy: to confirm Life and Love as values and to
comicalize their discourses and also the reflecting subject that
generates them. In the framework of narrative strategies, reflection in
The Public Burning is the polarizer of the book, just as it is in
Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, where reflection is split into a
narrowly rational, cause-and-effect oriented, “closed” style of
thinking reified into the beliefs of the “They-System”, and a kind of
system-busting, “open” reflection that establishes the critical voice of
the counterforce that forms an alliance with the imagination in the
attempt to avoid closure (see also The Crying of Lot 49). Reflection
Character 521

is one crucial weapon against what Federman calls “man’s obsessive


need to construct artificial codes or systems with which he can
conceal from himself the real lack of any code or system in life”
(1973, 114). The other is the imaginative fantastication of the
situation as medium of parody, satire, and the comic view. And the
two, as has become obvious, can be combined into a means of
plurisignification.

7.12.3. Love Against Reason: John Barth, “Menelaiad”

In Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, thinking is not a human


force that turns against stereotyped belief and thus reveals the force
of life, but rather it is the searcher for reason, the creator of form.
The book, which is full of “[e]pic perplexity” (153), contains two
stories that dramatize the phenomenon of love. One of them, “Night-
Sea Journey”, was discussed in a former chapter under the aspect of
the “absurd”. The other is “Menelaiad”, a masterpiece in combining
possibility-thinking with possibility- narration while filling gaps of,
and adding variants to, an established tale or myth, a method Barth
further develops in the stories from Chimera or the novel The Last
Voyage of Somebody [i.e., Sinbad] the Sailor, drawing for his
material, for instance, on A Thousand and One Tales, Homer, and
others. “Menelaiad” is the story of Menelaus who is obsessed with
the question of why his wife Helen loves and has wed him when she
had the choice of so many more glamorous men. In this story, love,
the “[u]nimaginable notion” (150), withstands reason; feeling
masters reflection, silence holds out against speech. The recounting
of Menelaus’s obsession dramatizes the relation among the key-
attitudes towards (human) life, between feeling and thinking, force
and form. Love is the great mystery of feeling, of life, as is Helen,
who caused the Trojan war, and reflection — Menelaus’s continuous
question “why me?” — is the endless attempt to solve this mystery,
endless because thinking here cannot fuse its two goals, analysis or
difference and synthesis. The “fearsome mystery” (151) of love, or
rather, of “being loved”, is the indefinable mystery of human
integration within life, within its indissoluble unity; reflection, on the
contrary, is the unremitting human attempt at division. Menelaus
himself has “too much imagination to be a hero”, and his “problem
was [he’d] leisure to think” (138). Thinking or creating endless
522 From Modernism to Postmodernism

differences, is not enough to solve his problem, which does not allow
for a logical end or final result, because love cannot be defined.
Therefore he calls up his memory and his imagination, of which he
has too much (or too little, depending on the viewpoint), in order to
establish a system of (seven) interrelated stories, whose purpose is to
answer his questions and “to hold fast to layered sense” (145)
through the “cloaks of story” (140). Menelaus imagines that he tells
the story to Helen (at three various times and places), adding and
including further stories he told to Proteus and Proteus’s daughter
Eidothea. These “cloaks of story” recall events and relationships of
the past, which weigh heavily on him and in which his present state
remains imprisoned.
The desperate cognitive and imaginative processes of
Menelaus’s mind show all the traits of excess and contradiction: the
extension of limits, the crossing of borderlines (towards the mystic
realm of love), a rare combination of existentializing and de-
existentializing purposes, the transformation of contrary positions, in
Beckett’s manner, into the aesthetic gestalt of paradox — and all this
in the hopeless attempt to attain the truth by separating reality from
fiction, while love is undevisable, unrelatable, and therefore
indefinable in discourse. The text is a play with continuous reversals
that only an unusual number of longer quotations can document. The
obsessive processes of reflection are correlated (ironically and
comically, but also existentially) with the reduction of personal
substance; that is, the thinking process (in a variation of the
Beckettian manner) swallows up the thinker. Menelaus opens the
story with the words “Menelaus here, more or less”; his “voice is
Menelaus, all there is of him. When I’m switched on I tell my tale,
the one I know, How Menelaus Became Immortal, but I don’t know
it” (127). Stories, reflections, language have imploded what there
was of him as a person. Driven by his “curious fancy” and reflective
mind, he recounts where and to whom he asked the decisive question
“Why me?” (150). He notes: “One thing’s certain: somewhere
Menelaus lost course and steersman, went off track, never got back
on, lost hold of himself, became a record merely, the record of his
loosening grasp. He’s the story of his life, with which he ambushes
the unwary unawares” (128). In the first frame of the narrative, in his
palace many years after Troy has fallen and he has regained his wife
Helen, Menelaus tells his story to two young guests, Telemachus, the
Character 523

son of Odysseus, and Peisistratus, the son of Nestor, with Helen most
of the time present, and the two young men asking questions about
points of (un)logic in Menelaus’s tale. But their probing into the
identity of persons and their metamorphosis, in an attempt to reduce
possibility to actuality, in fact ironically multiplies possibility:

‘Who was it said “Never mind?’ “ asked Peisistratus. ‘Your wife?


Eidothea? Tricky Proteus? The voice is yours; whose are the words?’ ‘Never
mind.’ ‘Could it be, could it have been, that Proteus changed from a leafy
tree not into air but into Menelaus on the beach at Pharos, thence into
Menelaus holding the Old Man of the Sea? Could it even be that all these
speakers you give voice to —’ “ “Never mind”, I say (146).

Direct dialogue between Menelaus and Helen combines with


the cloak of stories to create a simultaneity of places, times, persons,
or versions. The quotation-marks indicate the different cloaks that
envelop the story:

“ ‘ “ ‘ “ ‘ “Speak!” Menelaus cried to Helen on the bridal bed,’ I reminded


Helen in her Trojan bedroom”, I confessed to Eidothea on the beach, ‘I
495 declared to Proteus in the cavemouth, “I vouchsafed to Helen on the
ship,’ I told Peisistratus at last in my Spartan hall”, I say to whoever and
where — I am. And Helen answered:
“ ‘ “ ‘ “ ‘ “ Love! “ ‘ “ ‘ “ ‘ “
! (150)

Menelaus on his way back from Troy forces Proteus to tell him how,
after many years of adverse winds, he can “get off this beach” at
Pharos and reach home.

“ ‘ “Proteus answered: ‘You ask too many questions. Not Athena, but
Aphrodite is your besetter. Leave Helen with me here; go back to the
mouth of River Egypt. There where the yeasting slime of green
unspeakable jungle springs ferments the sea of your intoxicate Greek
bards,’ that’s how the chap talks, ‘make hecatombs to Aphrodite; beg
Love’s pardon for your want of faith. Helen chose you without reason
because she loves you without cause; embrace her without question and
watch your weather change. Let go’ (156).

Menelaus finally reaches the point where he does not

ask what’s changed the wind, your [Helen’s] opinion, me, why I hang here
like, onto, and by my narrative. Gudgeon my pintle, step my mast, vessel
me where you will. I believe all. I understand nothing. I love you (156-57).
524 From Modernism to Postmodernism

The next section (III) opens with Helen’s paradoxical rejoinder:

“ ‘Snarled thwarted Helen: “Love!” Then added through our chorus groan:
“Loving may waste us into Echoes, but it’s being loved that kills.
Endymion! Semele! Io! Adonis! Hyacinthus: Loving steers marine
Odysseus; being loved turned poor Callisto into navigation-stars. Do you
love me to punish me for loving you?” (157)

To make the confusion absolute: “ ‘Helen kissed my bilging tears


and declared: “Husband, I have never been in Troy [...] I’ve never
made love with any man but you” (157-58).

“ ‘Doubt no more”, said Helen. “Your wife was never in Troy. Out of love
for you I left you when you left [for Delphi to ask the oracle, “Who am
I?”], but before Paris could up-end me, Hermes whisked me on Father’s
orders to Egyptian Proteus and made a Helen out of clouds to take my
place.
“ ‘ “All these years I’ve languished in Pharos [...] It wasn’t I, but
cold Cloud-Helen you fetched from Troy, whom Proteus dissolved the
noon you beached him. When you then went off to account to Aphrodite, I
slipped aboard. Here I am. I love you” (158).

This opens the puzzle of possibilities, an interfusion of imagination


and reflection, of “fact” and fiction, in an unending division and
layering of sense that turns the simple into the complex (which Barth
says he loves), the serious into the comic, the reasonable into the
ineffable. To Helen’s question “Don’t you believe me?”

“ ‘ “What ground have I for doubt?” I whispered. “But that imp


aforementioned gives me no peace. ‘How do you know,’ he whispers with
me, ‘that the Helen you now hang onto isn’t the cloud-one? Why mayn’t
your actual spouse be back in Troy, or fooling in naughty Egypt yet?”’
“ ‘ “ Or home in Lacedemon”, Helen added, “where she’d been all along,
waiting for her husband”.
“ ‘Presently my battle voice made clear from stem to stem my grown
conviction that the entire holocaust at Troy, with its prior and subsequent
fiascos, was but a dream of Zeus’s conjure, visited upon me to lead me to
Pharos and the recollection of my wife (158-59).

The result of all these endless divisions/-


possibilities/confusions can either be despair or laughter. Menelaus
(and Barth) chooses a mixture of existential pain and comic mode.
He “continues to hold on, but can no longer take the world seriously.
Character 525

Place and time, doer, done-to have lost their sense” (160). What
remains is change and metamorphosis:

Ajax is dead, Agamemnon, all my friends, but I can’t die, worse luck;
Menelaus’s carcass is long wormed, yet his voice yarns on through
everything, to itself. Not my voice, I am this voice, no more, the rest has
changed, rechanged, gone. The voice too, even that changes, becomes
hoarser, loses its magnetism, grows scratchy, incoherent, blank.
I’m not dismayed. Menelaus was lost on the beach at Pharos; he
is no longer, and may be in no poor case as teller of his gripping history.
For when the voice goes he’ll turn tale, story of his life, to which he clings
yet, whenever, how-, by whom- recounted. Then when as must at last
every tale, all tellers, all told, Menelaus’s story itself in ten or ten thousand
years expires, yet I’ll survive it, I, in Proteus’s terrifying last disguise,
Beauty’s spouse’s odd Elysium: the absurd, unending possibility of love
(161-62).

This story clearly reveals Barth’s creative procedure of


multiplying perspectives. Abstracting from the concrete narrative
process of the text, one can note the following: Barth takes a mythic
tale as his subject, here the abduction of Helena by Paris and the
subsequent Trojan War, and then superimposes his own story on the
basic tale, filling out gaps that are left open in the account of the
original story. This gap here is the reaction of Menelaus to the return
of his wife Helena after the victory of the Greeks over the Trojans. In
his own story Barth chooses a central theme, love, the most
elemental, invigorating but also ineffable feeling that the human
being experiences in his or her life. However, he not only gives an
account of a specific relationship between man and woman but also
problematizes love. Barth makes love an enigma and the
mysteriousness of love the central problem in the relationship
between husband and wife. The riddle of love is deepened by the
puzzle of identity, which sharpens the feeling of uncertainty in
Menelaus. This feeling of uncertainty raises questions about Helena’s
feelings and motives in marrying Menelaus in the first place, Helena
having had so many better choices. Helena’s inability or refusal to
explain her feelings, her only answer being “love”, has a double
effect. It exemplifies Wittgenstein’s dictum that private feelings
cannot be represented in language, which is always public, and at the
same time it throws Menelaus into an existential crisis. Since
reflection about the state of love cannot explain or even come near to
understand this most existential feeling of synthesis, Menelaus recurs
526 From Modernism to Postmodernism

to storytelling, in fact cloaks the phenomenon of love with multiple


stories, without being able to clarify the mystery of love either
through storytelling or reflection because one story always produces
another and because one thought creates a chain of thoughts. The
failure to overcome doubt and the crisis of identity causes Menelaus
to lose himself.
Though this account gives only a one-dimensional report of
what happens, it shows how Barth’s narrative argument progresses
on all levels, from the concrete, confrontational situation of dialogue
to the philosophical problem and back to the situation, its
deconstruction and reconstruction. In order to be able to do so, the
author, in addition to superimposing feeling and reflection, mystery
and explanation, dialogue and narrative, love and storytelling, writes
in “irrealistic” (Barth) terms. He fantasizes all aspects of the story, a
strategy which provides the opportunity to multiply the perspectives
of narration and evaluation, existentializing and de-existentializing
the crisis of love and identity, playing with it, ironizing character and
problem, comicalizing Menelaus’ behavior, mystifying love. The
story finally turns into a situationalized poetological statement,
making telling the story the only thing that lasts, not, however, with-
out playing with and also ironizing this idea and again complicating
the playful attitude with the pain of Menelaus, the narrator of his
story.

7.12.4. Feeling, Reflection, and Perception: Ronald Sukenick,


“The Permanent Crisis”

In “The Permanent Crisis”, from The Death of the Novel and


Other Stories, the contrast and interrelation of the mental faculties of
desire, feeling/mood, reflection, and perception are again made into a
programmatic, situated, poetological statement. Reflection is related
to reason, form and self-enclosure and is posed against feeling and
perception, which stand for spontaneity, body-consciousness, and
direct participation in the life process. The situation here is a writer’s
suffering from artistic blockage and his attempts to overcome it.
Writer’s block isolates the husband/author from his environment and
impedes his relationship with his wife. He is a man of thought, of
self-analysis, “a self that could only analyze its own consciousness, a
consciousness aware only of its own mutterings” (4). Reflection may
Character 527

analyze his feeling of crisis but cannot understand or change it, since
it does not operate on the same emotional level. The husband is in the
apartment with his unhappy wife late in the evening before going to
bed. In an attempt at understanding what has happened to him, he
stares

at his blank page with an expression that looked like the mask of misery,
saying to himself, it’s like being in space so empty you don’t even know
whether you’re there, trying to describe what was happening so it would
stop happening, this paralysis, to call it a paralysis, because he would
know what to think about it and more important, what to feel about it, and
she came to the door of the bedroom and moaned (1).

Reflection here has no power of synthesis and integration.


The reflexive analysis of the situation can only proceed in terms of
negation and exclusion of possibilities. The protagonist feels
something like “the loss of ambition no, like the exhaustion of desire
no, more, as if he couldn’t discover the forms for desire, or as if he
wanted nothing because he could find nothing to want” (2). “[H]e
had never really accepted being married” (2), “it had all been
disappearing, his work, his degree, his career — not that they weren’t
still there, but that he couldn’t see them, a death of interest —
disappearing, disappeared, until tonight he felt he too could dis-
appear” (3). The process of reflection leads him on, and he tries to
find explanations, reasons for this loss of energy and hope: “Life is
failure. Or if that’s not true, that’s the way I feel, or he wondered, did
that sound hollow, what had he expected that the enlightened, liberal
upper middle class wasn’t going to give him, what life freer, larger
than he had sensed since long ago beyond his home, beyond the
reach of his family” (3). After acknowledging that the life of
“immense possibilities he had been led to conceive” (3) in fact still
existed for him, “he suddenly felt as empty, as tawdry, and above all,
as pointless as the succession of stores [of his father] in Brooklyn
only worse, because you would have to know exactly what you were
doing to yourself, But why? she asked, Why?” (3) The sense of
emptiness he feels cannot be analyzed; it is in fact “like a feeling of
betraying something — but what? since there was nothing to betray
in a society in whose forms and procedures he neither believed nor
disbelieved” (4).
528 From Modernism to Postmodernism

The turn-around comes when he remembers his


grandfather’s maxim “Live! Enjoy!” (6). He then finally changes
from reasoning to accepting, from the values of society to those of
Life, and indeed no longer thinks of what has disappeared and is
missing. Instead of setting his trust in dissecting reflection, he begins
to rely on unquestioning perception. Not thinking but only feeling
changes feeling; the feeling of and trust in serial continuity saves
him, the feeling that everything that happens is falling into place.
And this feeling makes him open up to visual experience; he is able
to perceive his environment and his wife and return to the immediate
“truth of the situation” (Sukenick 1985, 25), from which he was
separated by despair and reflection and their closure. In this
movement towards the given, reflection changes into wondering,
which is what Sukenick calls “experiential thinking”, i.e., a post-
logical and unpremeditated “process of cogitation” (1985, 132) that
is able to provide the synthesis between the self and life. It lies in the
acknowledgement of what is and has been and the openness to what
is to come:

wondering why all this was coming together now, what he had done, was
doing, noticed his wife nodding in her chair, her thick lashes veiling her
eyes, wondering why it was all coming together what he had done, where
he had been, the people, [...] how he had been alone in cities and
something had always turned up, a friend or someone with a car and
money always coming from somewhere [...] how there was always some
other place to go and even something else to do [...] how it all came
together and was a life, some kind of life, he saw his wife almost asleep
sprawling in her chair a little childishly and could have kissed her [...]
wondered why he suddenly wanted to kiss her (6).

Energy and trust in life return, which makes him realize that
“if it’s so tonight it might be so again tomorrow and if not tomorrow
then the day after, and he stopped trying to figure it out, playing it by
ear, listening to himself because there was nothing else to listen to
and it sounded right he wondered why, as if he were a kind of artist
and knew he was right but didn’t know how he knew, he would have
to write that down” (7). The answer to the problems of the artist is
“improvisation again and again and never the same”:

if it was pointless then it was pointless, if he was disintegrated all right he


was disintegrated, he turned out the last light, because he knew this was
going to happen to him again and again no matter what and all he could do
Character 529

was try to sense what was happening and compose it like a man as he
listens to his own voice composing ceaselessly, he would have to write this
down all of it (7).

The circle of frustration, reflection, and


acceptation/perception is what the title calls the permanent crisis that
the writer has to face, and that he can remedy only by “writing it
down”, by the spontaneity and improvisation of storytelling. This is
an exemplary poetological story in that it lays down the artistic
principle Sukenick believes in, namely that “[t]he mind orders reality
not by imposing ideas on it but by discovering significant relations
within it, as the artist abstracts and composes the elements of reality
in significant integrations that are works of art” (1985, 171). It is
something like Keats’s “negative capability” of perception, which
stands at the beginning and end of both understanding life and
creating relations in art. The question of course remains open as to
how to get from perception and feeling to composition, from the
concreteness of the situation experienced to the abstraction of
relations and “significant integrations”. Sukenick’s answer is in-
dicated by the course of the story and is stated in an essay from In
Form: “[T]he form of the novel should seek to approximate the shape
of experience” (207). This shape, however, is utterly indeterminate
and unpredictable. Its form of composition is a spontaneous flow of
the imagination resting in the present, of liberating improvisations, “a
nexus of various kinds of energy, image and experience”; for “[a]s an
activity, fiction first of all involves a flow of energy” (11-12), a flow
of energy without a predetermined direction or goal: “Keep moving.
Where? Nowhere, as fast as possible”(DN 62-63). The flow of
energy, not the process of reflection is here the source, medium, and
goal of experience and also its synthesis; the transfer of energy into
fiction is the goal of narrative. Yet, as Sukenick admits in another
statement, improvisation is not enough. Fiction needs not only force
but also form. What gives the flow of experience form in this story
and in other texts are the productive relations among different ways
of relating to life: namely, perception, feeling, and thinking. Prac-
tically all postmodern authors are convinced of the key role of energy
as the generating principle of both experience and narrative because
it is the principle of life. And they all face the problem of how to
complement force with form. The specific manner of handling this
problem reveals the individuality of the writer.
530 From Modernism to Postmodernism

7.12.5. Positions of Innocence and Experience: William Gass,


Omensetter’s Luck

Omensetter’s Luck is also a programmatic story with a


thematic core, which focuses not so much on the identity of a central
character but rather on the function and value of the abilities of the
human mind, perception, feeling, reflection, tested here under the
aspects of innocence and experience, and their multiple
interpretation. One of the first reviewers of the book called it “the
first convincing fusion of speculative thought and hard, accurate
sensuality that we have had, it is tempting to say, since Melville”
(Gilman 23). Even if this were true, which it hardly is (James, for
instance, comes to mind), the problem in Omensetter’s Luck is not
only the fusion of reflection and sensory experience but also their
opposition in a design that sets civilization against nature, experience
against innocence, thought against perception, the mind against the
body. It thematizes these dualities in terms of the (unavoidable)
human fall from innocence to experience. The book is organized
around this thematic matrix.
Brackett Omensetter, who moves with his family to Gilean, a
small town in Ohio and symbolically “the capital of human nature”
(235), is characterized as a kind of prelapsian Adam by the natural-
ness of his behavior, animal-like ease, and lack of self-consciousness.
He appears to the townspeople to be free of guilt and sin, to live
without the burden and anxiety to which humankind is subject. The
luck that he feels he has is the outer manifestation of this psychic
state of innocence before the Fall, his oneness with nature, his living
within a state of perception rather than in rationalizing
(self)reflection or transgressing desire.

Brackett Omensetter was a wide and happy man. He could whistle like the
cardinal whistles in the deep snow, or whirr like the shy ‘white rising from
its cover, or be the lark a-chuckle at the sky. He knew the earth. He put his
hands in water. He smelled the clean fir smell. He listened to the bees. And
he laughed his deep, loud, wide and happy laugh whenever he could —
which was often, long and joyfully (31).

The reaction of the townspeople is split. Many have a sense of


admiration and awe for his free spirit and his harmonious relations
Character 531

with nature. Others develop envy and suspicion. Even the Reverend
Furber, his opponent, notes that “whatever Omensetter does he does
without desire in the ordinary sense, with a kind of abandon, a stony
mindlessness that makes me always think of Eden” (126).
Around Omensetter are grouped, in an arrangement that
demonstrates the systematic organization of the novel, the three other
main figures: “the devoted chronicler, the worshipper, the opponent.
All must see an extraordinary power in him, otherwise they could not
stop to chronicle, worship or oppose”. These characters are also
distinguished by their mode of language: “Tott [the chronicler] took
on the responsibilities of narrative, Pimber [the worshipper] the
responsibilities of the lyric, Furber [the opponent] those of rhetoric,
and finally, since he is pivotal, the dramatic as well” (Gass 1969, 95-
96). Furthermore, “each of the major characters [...] represents a
different artistic type, and they are all bad as far as I’m concerned”
(McCaffery 1982b, 225), the reason being that they are neither
genuine nor one-sided. Gass further notes that he “chose to write
about the kind of allegorical conflict that occurs particularly in the
earlier literature in America, such as in works by Hawthorne and
Melville”, (McCaffery 1982b, 225); i.e., he writes about the dualities
and varieties of the complementary perspectives mentioned above.
The main conflict that is here interesting is that between
Omensetter and the Reverend Furber. The latter represents civili-
zation, order, and the church, and demonstrates in his psyche the
opposition between mind and body, belief and disbelief, or reflection.
Furber is trained in philosophy and theology and is a gifted
rhetorician, but he suffers from an unsatisfied sexual hunger that
causes him to wage within himself “a kind of Machiavellian war
between Spirit and Body, which he equates at first with Good and
Evil” (Schneider 13). While Omensetter’s purpose is “just” living,
Furber’s is belief and reflection, supposedly mirroring moral and
spiritual superiority. Yet in spite of his philosophical and religious
speculations, “Furber literally has no real beliefs”, so that there is an
unbridgeable “distance between his feelings and his actions” and a
“contrast between his inner and outer life” (Gass 1969, 100). Reflec-
tion, revealing the truth behind his façade of believing, has become
self-reflexive and self-destructive. It denotes differences but cannot
create a synthesis between self and belief, or self and life, or belief
and life, for his existence; his mental activities are too full of
532 From Modernism to Postmodernism

contradictions, of posing and masking and uncovering these masks.


His regressus ad infinitum sharpens and existentializes the conflict
to the point of madness (a development that Coover avoided in The
Public Burning in order to be able to use Nixon in various functions
and under different perspectives):

Sometimes while he walked he would break into wild half-whispered


words instead, and turn with open arms to the walls and leaves, his gaze
fixed ecstatically on heaven, adopting the posture of saints he’d seen in
prints [...] Or unable to stomach his own acting, he would turn to mockery.
Oh give us a dramatic speech. And often he would oblige, charming
himself with his rhetoric like a snake playing the flute (74).

The systematizing and contrasting of faculties and attitudes


— recognizable already in the character-constellation, where it is
employed for general thematic purposes that are no longer
necessarily grounded in the self — point in the postmodern direction.
The existentializing of life’s antinomies in Furber’s psyche, his
suffering and pain, on the other hand, direct the book towards
modernism — except that Furber, in a truly postmodern manner,
cannot finally separate mask and self, reflection and rhetoric, which
instead form an unholy unity. This failure to come to self-identity
results in a split reaction to life and self. The failure of attaining
authenticity of the self is not only a cause for the (modernist)
suffering of the self. It is also the motivation for the converse,
namely Furber’s (futile) endeavor to distance himself from the self,
from feeling and pain, by a postmodern kind of irony. Furber’s
divided response is recognizable in all his reactions to the world.
Which position he takes depends on the viewpoint: innocence or
experience, acceptance or rejection of life or a mixture of both.
Meditating on Omensetter’s game of effortlessly skipping stones
over the water, “a marvel of transcending”, Furber thinks of the joy it
would be to escape the complexity of the self and to be such a stone
“effortlessly lifting” (117) since the stone possesses no “knowledge”,
cannot sin, has no feeling of guilt — knowledge, sin, guilt all being
the result of humanity’s Fall. But then he equates such a stone- or
animal-like existence, which Omensetter supposedly lives, with sin,
concluding that Omensetter must be an agent of Evil:

There is everywhere in nature a partiality for the earlier condition, and an


instinctive urge to return to it. To succumb to this urge is to succumb to
Character 533

the wish of the Prince of Darkness, whose aim is to defeat, if possible, the
purposes of God’s creation[.] For the most part men look upon their
humanity as a burden, and call the knowledge of what they are a simple
consequence of sin. Men, like things, resist their essence, and seek the
sweet oblivion of the animal — a rest from themselves that’s but an easy
counterfeit of death ... Yet when Adam disobeyed, he lit this sun in our
heads. Now, like the slowest worm, we sense; but like the mightiest god,
we know (175).

Furber’s psychological situation, however, is further


complicated. It includes the reality-fiction problem and the language-
meaning opposition. As indicated, reflection stands not only against
belief and innocence, it also faces the temptations of language and of
words. By blending with rhetoric, reflection loses its sharpness,
articulates itself only in words, has no consequences in life. Furber is
“[f]earless in speech” but “cowardly in all else” (164), and he keeps
“everything at a word’s length” (182), erects “his beautiful barriers
of words” (183) against living, against sexuality, joy, and love:
“[Y]es, words were superior; they maintained a superior control; they
touched without your touching; they were at once the bait, the hook,
the line, the pole, and the water in between” (113). Even when he is
sexually most aroused, he has “made love with discreet verbs and
light nouns, delicate conjunctions” (162). Furber’s change of heart
occurs when Omensetter trustingly comes to him, his enemy, to tell
him straight away that he considers him his friend, and to inform him
that he has found Pimber’s corpse (who has committed suicide
because Omensetter could and would not help him to regain the
“natural” state of innocence and inner harmony). Furber realizes that
Omensetter has lost his unself-consciousness and has come to
“know” his luck, which he thereby loses, making him a normal man
fallen from innocence to experience. Furber then for the first time
responds directly and honestly: “Where — where have you been? My
god. My god. A friend. I’ve spent my life spreading lies about you”
(190). In reflecting on his reflections and responding to Omensetter’s
humble remark, Furber bursts out: “All that matters is you trust me”,
making for the first time the effort to pronounce Omensetter’s first
name correctly: “What a godforsaken soul I have Ba — Brackett —
what a shit I am” (191). This encounter finally returns him from
thought and rhetoric to feeling and to perception, to active
participation in other people’s lives, which, he comes to see, are
more important than abstractions.
534 From Modernism to Postmodernism

This gives cause for another reversal of relations that also


relativizes the position of Omensetter who, when his child is sick and
near to death, refuses to call a doctor and trusts his luck that he in
fact already has lost through knowledge. First of all, Furber, now
genuinely moved by the child’s sickness and anxious to do
something, makes a confession of his sins. Yet with him even
honesty is permeated with reflection on honesty, which results in
rhetorical performance of honesty. He overblows “his vices so his
charge would lack conviction. Was that not, admittedly, the
maneuver of a monster? So often clever. Note how sweetly I
pronounce her, musically wig-wag my ringalingling tongue” (206).
But when he has finished, and sees Omensetter “set the stones in
piles to form a circle” to save his luck magically instead of going for
a doctor, Furber destroys the barricade and fiercely calls out against
Omensetter: “I think you’re a monster and you are proving me right
... I’ve been right about everything all along ... if only I had believed
myself” (207). He admonishes Omensetter to go for help, repudiating
at the same time all his own former beliefs, magic or religious,
trusting only feeling and perception, which — and that is the
unbreakable circle of the human lot — are, however, inseparable
from thought: “You’ve got to go — there’s no luck in this world and
no god either” (208). Driving back with Pimber’s corpse in a wagon,
Furber thinks about what he has come to know about the fallen
condition of the human being, in a dialogue with God and the dead
man. Now the act of thinking joins with the act of genuine feeling in
a situational synthesis, which is the most reflection can achieve in
terms of synthesis. This ultimately cannot reconcile God and the
world, nor innocence and experience, nor perception and reflection.
Finally, reflection can only save its distance by employing irony and
rhetoric to cover up the existential affliction with nothingness, the
void:

Heavenly Father, You may call the soul our best, but this, our body, is our
love. [...] How simply is our fondness for it guaranteed: we can’t live
outside of it, not as we are, not as we wish. [...] What power have You, if
You can’t continue us, and what cruel nature have You to refuse? The
moist soul hangs about the body, too heavy to rise. How cleverly, Henry,
you avoided that. Henry, listen, Omensetter was nothing, only another
man. Now he is given to despair beyond any of yours. Well there you are
— we all despair. [...] They are in despair and you’re the one in luck. [...]
We wish to be so like the dead, we living. But we shiver from the cold in
Character 535

spite of ourselves, and we hate your liberty of lying like a stone enough to
envy the birds who pecked your eyes. Most of all, we envy you — that you
should open them unfeeling to their bills. My god! my eyes are every
minute pained by what they see. I should take strength from being blind, if
I were you. Vision is no kindly injury. [...] Why have You made us the
saddest animal? He pushed himself off and felt the jar in his bones. He
cannot do it, Henry, that is why. He can’t continue us. All He can do is try
to make us happy that we die. Really, He’s a pretty good fellow (213-14).

The novel provides a chain of systematic but ambivalent


deconstructions. Reflection destroys the (false) security of belief but
is itself obstructed by rhetoric and “wordiness”. Feeling undoes the
arrogance of reflection by activating the concrete situation of
suffering against the abstractedness of thought. Life’s condition
denies humankind the synthesis of consciousness and of what might
be called the unity of an authentic self, as well as a harmonious
relation between self and world. Humans have only two choices: to
perceive and feel, which means suffering and pain, or to think and
escape into words and abstractions and, if that does not help, into
(self)irony. Both Furber and Omensetter leave the town, which is, as
mentioned, “the capital of human nature” (235). One does not need
to add that here, too, the issue ultimately is not character but the
confrontation of “abstracted” attitudes in concrete situations (the
suffering of characters adding a modernist note that is also
recognizable in postmodern texts).

7.12.6. Self-Reflexivity and the “Voice of Language”: Barth and


Federman

Our analysis of the role of reflection in postmodern fiction


comes to an end with a discussion of self-reflexivity. Self-reflection
occurs in postmodern fiction in two radically different forms. On the
one hand, it appears as meta-reflection in fiction, which “endlessly
studies its own behaviors and considers them suitable subject matter
[...] It is not art for art’s sake, but art about art” (Shattuck 327). On
the other hand, self-reflexivity does not take its position, as it were,
above the narrative process, enquiring into its rules and problems, but
within it. In this case, narrative and language generate self-reflexivity
as they go along without a separate reflexive effort. Barth (who
serves here as an example for comparison’s sake) is on the one end
of the scale, with Federman (and Sukenick) on the other. Barth’s
536 From Modernism to Postmodernism

stories in Lost in the Funhouse dramatize the creative process by


reflecting, through the narrator, about narrative strategies, the
difficulty of finding the right beginning or end, or about how to
proceed in the middle, which method to choose (without coming to
satisfactory conclusions about structure, detailing, subject-matter, the
position of the narrator, etc.) or, quite generally, about the synthesis
between reflection and imagination. In fact, Barth states that he is not
interested in syntheses. Critical and narratological reflections like the
following appear in many of his stories and novels. They identify,
especially in the stories from Lost in the Funhouse, problems that
refer both to the situation of the narrator and the situation of the
narrated. They rise in the course of narration, putting in doubt that
which he has written so far: “Overmuch presence appears to be the
storyteller’s problem”; “one may yet distinguish narrator from
narrative, medium from message” (“Echo”, LF 98); “There is no
texture or rendered sensory detail”. “Is anything more tiresome, in
fiction, than the problems of sensitive adolescents? And it’s all too
long and rambling” (“Lost in the Funhouse” 85, 88); “Beginning: in
the middle, past the middle, nearer three-quarters done, waiting for
the end. Consider how dreadful so far: passionlessness, abstraction,
pro, dis. And it will get worse. Can we possibly continue?” (the
opening of “Title”, LF 102); “one afternoon the possibility would
occur to the writer of these lines that his own life might be a fiction,
in which he was the leading or an accessory character” (“Life-Story”,
LF 113).
Convinced that existence of the self is exclusively existence
in the spontaneity and self-evidence of the language-process,
Federman goes the opposite way; he places self-reflexivity primarily
in the process of writing, in language, and in typographical and
graphic arrangements. He wrote his dissertation on Beckett,
published as Journey to Chaos: Samuel Beckett’s Early Fiction, and
he has said that Beckett had a powerful influence on his own work.
He notes: “This is the essential question, the central idea of Beckett’s
work — a question that all human beings should ask themselves, [...]
What the fuck am I doing here in this life? My own writing is always
about that” (LeClair and McCaffery 134). What attracts Federman in
Beckett is that the Beckettian hero pursues “an epistemological quest
whose purpose is not the discovery of some philosophical or
psychological truth, but the negation of all concepts formulated by
Character 537

man to rationalize his existence” (1965, 57-58). Yet Federman also


sees limits in Beckett, namely that he “closed it [his dead world] for
us. After Beckett there is no possibility of writing about the world
again, at least not that old dying world” (LeClair and McCaffery
138). The postmodernist writer, however, would want to use the
positive potential that Federman sees in Beckett’s protagonists:
“[T]hough they are aware that they will never win, they also know
that they cannot lose either, which provides them with a ground for
affirmation in this negative plight, with a rationale for their ‘fidelity
to failure’” (Kutnik, Novel of Performance 154). Yet with Federman,
the positive potential lies not in the heroes but in language. He writes
in Surfiction that

no meaning pre-exists language, but that language creates meaning as it


goes along, [...] as it progresses, then writing (fiction especially) will be a
mere process of letting language do its tricks. To write, then, is to produce
meaning, and not reproduce a pre-existing meaning. To write is to
progress and not to remain subjected (by habit or reflexes) to the meaning
that supposedly precedes the words (8).

Fiction is thus performatory, and as such it is “self-


reflexive”. Here self-reflexivity is a characteristic of language. But
since the performance of language calls up a subject (just as the
subject, being a “word being”, is only manifested by language), the
self-reflexivity of the text is also the self-reflexivity of the subject.
(We might remind ourselves at this point of the fact that the
constitutional form of narrative is the situation and that the most
important constituent of the situation is the character, the self, the
subject, even if it is a self- and text-performing self.) For Federman,
“the essence of a literary discourse [...] is to find its own point of
reference, its own rules of organization in itself, and not in the real or
imaginary experience on which it rests” (1981b, 30-31). But there is
still the performing self, placed within the self-reflexivity of the text.
The self of his fiction Federman calls the “Present-Self”, or the
“‘Grammatological Self’ — no longer a Self which is a reproduction
or a representation of a PAST-SELF, but a Self which invents itself
in the present of the text, which improvises itself extemporaneously
as the text is written” (1979-80, 52). And this new self “is usually
presented [...] as a disembodied subject which functions as a pure
voice (or in some cases as a multi-voice which dispersed the
538 From Modernism to Postmodernism

centrality of the pronominal Self) and which performs the text rather
than being performed by the text, and thus becomes a Self-
performing-Self” (Federman 1981a, 198).
The reader participates in the performance of this self
intellectually, emotionally, and physically. The author wants “to give
the reader a sense of free participation in the writing/reading process,
in order to give the reader an element of choice (active choice) in the
ordering of the discourse and the discovery of its meaning”
(Federman 1975, 9). The self-reflexivity of language — including
typographical intervention that interrupts the linearity of reading and
would thus liberate the reader from a fixed relationship with the text
— thus leads to a self-reflexivity in the reader (In Double or Nothing
each page is typographically different from all the others). In the new
spontaneous, unpredictable — in fact perceptional, not causally
reflective — “fictitious discourse”, the

elements will now occur simultaneously and offer multiple possibilities of


rearrangement in the process of reading [...] It will circle around itself,
create new and unexpected movements and figures in the unfolding of the
narration, repeating itself, projecting itself backward and forward along the
curves of the writing. [...] The shape and order of fiction will not result
from an imitation of the shape and order of life, but rather from the formal
circumvolutions of language as it wells up from the unconscious
(Federman 1975, 11).

Self-reflexiveness now refers to all three: author, text, and


reader. The text is “a process of self-cancellation” (Federman 1977,
110) and self-installation: “to write a novel is not only to tell a story,
it is to confront the very act of writing a novel” (LeClair and
McCaffery 148), which is again a confrontation with the writing self
(and the other) and as such an act of self-reflection and reflection on
the self. The “Present-Self “of the text “invents its own reality, its
own unpredictable being, and even its own fictitious past. It may
even re-invent its author who then becomes as fictitious as his
creation” (Federman 1979-80, 53). The author and the reader,
creating meaning by the verbal performance of experience, are self-
reflexive in this process and gain self-understanding: “The more you
write [...] the better you stand a chance of understanding what you
are doing and who you are [...] In a way, it is because I can’t find it
that I keep looking for it” (LeClair and McCaffery 143). Federman
furthermore notes: “in a sense all my fiction is trying to come closer
Character 539

to the truth of my own self by writing myself into existence” (LeClair


and McCaffery 149). By making the text “deliberately illogical,
irrational, unrealistic, nonsequitur, and incoherent” (Federman 1975,
13), the reflecting subject, the object of reflection, the act of
reflection, and its rational content disappear into linguistic perfor-
mance, which, however, mysteriously reproduces a subject for itself,
for the author and the reader, and also a synthesis as the creative
result, which neither the self nor the world nor the combination of the
two but only language as self-reflexivity can seemingly provide. Yet
this complication is not a cause of despair, as it is for Beckett. It is
rather a proof of energy, and energy is in fact the generating principle
for creativity in which the reader is to participate. In addition to
Federman, Robbe-Grillet and Sukenick have also stated that the
novel has a didactic function, namely to teach self-liberating
creativity, the creation of one’s own worlds. Since “the act of
composing a novel is basically not different from that of composing
one’s reality [...] the main didactic job of the contemporary novelist
is to teach the reader how to invent his world” (Sukenick 1975,
41).129

7.13. The Minimalistic Program: Behavior and the


Diagrammatic Method

“Behavior” in our sense is not to be confused with what has


been termed in psychology Behaviorism. The latter flourished in the
first half of the twentieth century as a reaction to the introspective
psychology of Wundt, James, Titchener, and others, and it
emphasized what is considered to be “objective” and can be obser-
ved. Though such an “outside”, quasi-objective (in fact non-
objective) view on behavior (and perception) is often characteristic
of the narrative strategy of postmodern fiction. This simplifying
strategy is meant to be deceptive and is set against a more complex
view even if the latter appears as an empty space, as we will see. In
our context, behavior first of all defines itself by its difference from
other attitudes. It is distinguished from “perception”. Though
behavior includes perception, and perception is directed toward
observing behavior as an object, in the presentation of the narrated
situation the behavior-perspective differs from that of perception by
the accentuation of a more “factual” attitude toward what is seen or
540 From Modernism to Postmodernism

imagined. It is not interested in introspection, and it excludes


emotion and thought from the presentation of the situation. And it is
contrasted to action. Behavior is defined as subconscious, unwilled,
routinized, and not self-controlled, in contrast to “action”, which is
conscious, self-willed, and self-controlled. There are doubtless
problems of attribution and transition, but at the ends of the scale, the
two notions form heuristically useful distinctions, especially for
postmodern fiction, which contains little action or only disoriented,
fragmented or fantasized action, but a great deal of physical and
agential behavior.
Yet behavior stands not only in contrast to the full program
of consciousness and to action, it is also closely related to them. In
fact, behavior can be considered as the reduction and even antiform
of (the freedom of) action.130 As a reductive form of action, it can
indicate an automatization of (praxis-oriented) action. It dissolves the
active role of the character, concentrates on the result of what
happens, and gives actor and action the characteristics of something
seen from outside, of an event. Behavior is also the reductive form of
emotion and thought and the inner view, which is the result in
postmodern fiction of the decentering of character as subject and
object of the narrative argument. And in general psychological terms,
behavior is the reduction of and replacement for motivation and
traditional character-analysis. Sukenick, for instance, says: “The idea
of motivation itself may have decayed as a persuasive concept [...] So
it has seemed more fruitful for me as a novelist to concentrate on
behavior [...] for a whole lot of reasons the notion of depth
psychology and Freudian motivation doesn’t interest me much”.
And behavior is the antidote against “the illusionism that a lot of
writers of my generation are fighting against” (LeClair and
McCaffery 296, 297). The reduction of character to behavior implies
that, because of the impossibility of self-knowledge and knowledge
of the world, meaning cannot be deciphered in terms of introspection
(and action). It is instead restricted to the surface, dependent on
observable physical, agential, and linguistic behavior. This emotional
and intellectual minimalism is widespread but has not always been
applauded. Gass, for instance, finds a “fear of feeling” in the texts of
a number of postmodern writers, i.e., Hawkes, Barthelme, Coover,
Barth, Nabokov, Borges, who “neglect the full responsive reach of
their readers” (Bellamy 1974, 34). He adds: “My complaint about
Character 541

Barth, Borges, and Beckett is simply that occasionally their fictions,


conceived as establishing a metaphorical relationship between the
reader and the world they are creating, leave the reader too passive”
(35).
In praxis, the recording of behavior in fiction relates facts
and tends to a diagrammatic style that is reductive, but also
conclusive and assertive since it concentrates on the factual. The
description of behavior, also fantastic behavior, is often emptied of
pictorial details and leaves out the dynamics of time, process, and
transition. In such a case, the representation of the narrated situation
is often reduced to a visual and linguistic minimum, for instance to
subject, verb, object. Yet though the diagram is a static and depleted
form, seemingly complete and finite in itself, with the subject left
outside (see Serres 39), it contains, and even heightens all the
tensions between stasis and dynamis, immobility and mobility, by its
fixing the moment in an “abstracted” form. Foucault, as Deleuze
points out, sees in the diagram a strong tension between form and
force: “The diagram, as the fixed form of a set of relations between
forces, never exhausts force which can enter into other relations and
compositions. The diagram stems from the outside, but the outside
does not merge with any diagram” (Deleuze 1988, 89). Tensions also
emerge in the interconnection of diagrammatic situations, which is
again diagrammatic. The single, diagrammed episode is often
isolated and disconnected and has no personal, logical, temporal, or
spatial links to the preceding or to the following situations. Yet all
texts are intentional, initiate suppositions, cognitive states and
feelings, in short, activate the psychological code, whether it is
represented as such or not. Thus the gaps that the diagrammatic
method leaves are filled. Postmodern minimalism here radicalizes
modern strategies, for instance Hemingway’s “iceberg technique”
(with one-eighth of the narrative argument above ground and the
other seven-eighths hidden under the surface). As Iser notes, “[i]t is
typical of modern texts that they invoke expected functions in order
to transform them into blanks” (1978, 208). Jurij Lotman speaks in
this context of a “minus function” (145).
542 From Modernism to Postmodernism

7.13.1. The Diagrammatic Method and Postmodern Satire:


Donald Barthelme

The programming of behavior and the concomitant narrative


style of the diagrammatic method are features of a minimalistic
strategy that may be contrasted to the maximalistic one, for instance
of Barth and Pynchon. One is reminded of Thomas Wolfe’s
categorization of writers as “putter-inners” and “leaver-outers”, a
distinction which he employs, for his own defense, in a letter to Scott
Fitzgerald (Let 643), and which Ronald Sukenick and Stanley Elkin
apply to postmodern fiction.131 Having studied existential philosophy,
Barthelme is familiar with the concepts of angst and alienation,
identity and authenticity, but he also knows that all endeavors at
unity, wholeness, and permanence are condemned to failure. Strong
emotions belong to the past and are in fact no longer called for or
wanted. This reductionist method is quite different from the
modernist rejection of the direct expression of feeling. T. S. Eliot
wrote: “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from
emotion” (1934b, 21). The modernist counter-reaction against
Romantic emotionalism and Victorian melodrama and sentimentality
was a result of the aversion against nonformal synthesis, harmonies,
and happy endings, which were considered trivial. If modernist
writers express feeling, it is not joy but pain. According to Adorno,
“conscious unhappiness is [...] the one authentic dignity it [the mind]
has received in its separation from the body”. For the modernist
writer, the question that poses itself is not that of having emotions or
not, but how to express them. The answer is again formulated by T.S.
Eliot: “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by
finding an ‘objective correlative;’ in other words, a set of objects, a
situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that
particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must
terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is
immediately evoked” (1934a, 145).132 For the postmodernists, the
problem is not only how to express emotion. They doubt the ability
of language to express emotion and anyway feel ambivalent about
the place and role of emotions. Yet emotions belong to the
psychological code that always lies in wait, expressed or not, as we
saw, for instance, in Robbe-Grillet’s case, and these actions can be
activated by the reader. Planned or unplanned, all presentations of
Character 543

character and situation also express or suggest emotion, but now not
by “objective correlatives” in the modern sense, as something
present, but as absence, as gaps, and blanks, as emptiness and the
void. Gaps and the void do not define the emotions but they suggest
their presence even though they “disseminate” (Derrida) them. If
emotion appears on the surface, it is enclosed in discourses that
attenuate, pluralize, ironize, or comicalize it. Barthelme is a striking
example of how traditional forms of thinking, feeling, and desire are
deconstructed, while their foundational energy and force are
preserved in the gaps among incongruities, where they appear as
presence in absence.
In “A Manual for Sons” from The Dead Father, Barthelme
develops a program of “attenuated form” for emotion, desire, and
action. It is supposed to fill or to cover the ever-present gap and to
mediate between authoritative, repressive fatherhood and the chaos
of fatherlessness, and reduce the world to smaller stories and weaker
actions. This attenuated form corresponds to Barth’s “weaker” as-if
behavior and as-if realities in “Anonymiad”, and Vattimo’s
proposition of “weaker” thoughts. The novel and the Manual within
the novel thematize strength versus weakness, and bigness versus
smallness. The program of attenuation, however, is, as everything in
Barthelme, presented in an ambiguous way and tinged with irony:
Your true task, as a son, is to reproduce every one of the enormities
[committed by your father] touched upon in this manual, but in attenuated
form. You must become your father, but a paler, weaker version of him.
The enormities go with the job, but close study will allow you to perform
the job less well than it has previously been done, thus moving toward a
golden age of decency, quiet, and calmed fevers. Your contribution will
not be a small one, but “small” is one of the concepts that you should
shoot for [...] Begin by whispering, in front of a mirror, for thirty minutes a
day. Then tie your hands behind your back for thirty minutes a day, or get
someone else to do this for you. Then, choose one of your most deeply
held beliefs, such as the belief that your honors and awards have
something to do with you, and abjure it. Friends will help you abjure it,
and can be telephoned if you begin to backslide. You see the pattern, put it
into practice. Fatherhood can be, if not conquered, at least “turned down”
in this generation — by the combined efforts of all of us together (DF
179-80).

This program of “attenuation” is put to work in Barthelme’s


texts with a “factual” attitude and a diagrammatic method of
544 From Modernism to Postmodernism

representation that leaves discontinuities and gaps where emotion


and desire could or should have had their place. Leaving out the
dynamics of time, the reporting-the-facts-method reduces the
presentation of the narrated situation to visual lists that lack an
integrating instance, a perceptual and conceptual point of reference,
and use a linguistic minimum. (As mentioned, one of Barthelme’s
characters claims that “fragments are the only forms I trust” [UP
153].) An example of the diagrammatic method that does not belong
to the extreme cases of fragmentation and thus shows a rather typical
specimen is the description of the dwarfs’ concern about their
deteriorating relation to Snow White in the novel of the same name:

“She still sits there in the window, dangling down her long black hair
black as ebony. The crowds have thinned somewhat. Our letters have been
returned unopened. The shower-curtain initiative has not produced notable
results. She is, I would say, aware of it, but has not reacted either
positively or negatively. We have asked an expert in to assess it as to
timbre, pitch, mood and key. He should be here tomorrow. To make sure
we have the right sort of shower curtain. We have returned the red towels
to Bloomingdale’s”. At this point everybody looked at Dan, who
vomited. “Bill’s yellow crêpe-paper pajamas have been taken away from
him and burned. He ruined that night for all of us, you know that”. At this
point everybody looked at Bill, who was absent. He was tending the vats.
“Bill’s new brown monkscloth pajamas, made for him by Paul, should be
here next month. The grade of pork ears we are using in the Baby Ding
Sam Dew is not capable of meeting U.S. Govt. standards, or indeed, any
standards. Our man in Hong Kong assures us however that the next
shipment will be superior. Sales nationwide are brisk, brisk, brisk. Texas
Instruments is down four points. Control data is up four points. The pound
is weakening. The cow is calving. The cactus wants watering. The new
building is abuilding with leases covering 45 percent of the rentable space
already in hand. The weather tomorrow, fair and warmer (119-20).

Barthelme’s narrative strategy is to take up the conventional


characteristics of shorter fiction, its concentration on crises, conflicts,
and issues and then, so to speak, reverse this outline by treating the
force of the crises and conflicts unemotionally, without recourse to a
center, a focus, a value-system, the identity-concept of character, or,
for that matter, a recognizable narrator, who here decomposes into an
anonymous voice or several unidentifiable voices. The principles of
coordination are collage (its deconstruction of traditional arrange-
ments and connotations) and montage (of new artificial connections
and abrupt juxtapositions). In this way, the text produces a
Character 545

“derealization”, a “simplification” and “mechanization” of situations


and contexts. Presented is an unconnected series of abstractly and
expositorily factual statements. They resist any hierarchical, contex-
tual, or “humanizing” organization and exclude all interiority. But in
this diagram of the situation, which negates the familiar processes of
the mind, are inscribed ex negativo the unexpressed feelings and
desires, the defeat of emotional contact and satisfaction, as “minus
function” (Lotman). As in the case of Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy (see,
for instance, the passage in which the husband observes his wife as
she is brushing her hair) and in other cases of narrative minimalism,
the psychological code is abstracted, but returns under cover as
intention to fill/suggest the void.
The psychological code and the force of instincts and
conflict in Barthelme appear as intention behind the disjointed facts;
this always present code, whether articulated or not, sketches a self
behind the façade, suggests emotions, desires and thoughts, and the
lack of communication between isolated individuals. However,
thoughts and emotions are also directly addressed in matter-of-fact
language, in a kind of expository discourse of juxtapositions that
leaves gaps and pluralizes the perspectives on feeling. In the words
of a character from Snow White: “After a life rich in emotional
defeats, I have looked around for other modes of misery, other roads
to destruction. Now I limit myself to listening to what people say,
and thinking what pamby it is, what they say. My nourishment is
refined from the ongoing circus of the mind in motion. Give me the
odd linguistic trip, stutter and fall, and I will be content” (SW 139).
The “emotional defeat” is caused by the fact that the “Goals [are]
incapable of attainment”. These goals, the striving for faith, identity,
and satisfaction, “have driven many a man to despair”. In fact,
“despair is easier to get than that — one need merely look out of the
window, for example” (Am 109). But one knows that defeat and
despair are nothing new, and that there is no reason for excitement
about alienation. The title of a later collection, Sadness, describes
what one might call a state of muted, inner disturbance. It fits
Barthelme’s most typical works of the Sixties and Seventies, and is,
as it were, the response to the land of “Brain Damage”, to use the
title of one of his stories from City Life.
The attenuation of the emotion that fills the gaps between
abrupt juxtapositions or is expressed nonchalantly as something
546 From Modernism to Postmodernism

given lets the narrative attitude appear as a general mood, a mood of


irritation, confusion, or resignation. The lack of psychological
integration and social values in the text makes it impossible to fuse
perception, emotion, desire, and thought into a coordinated personal
experience and to give the experience intensity, direction, and
meaning. Feelings are strangely disconnected from the logic of
character and the logic of the narrated situation, and they appear to
be somewhat free-floating, not as experienced emotions but
abstracted as emotive “ideas” of loss, lack, and alienation, or of
sympathy, concern, and love. This is the reason that they can be
pronounced as such and at the same time ironized and satirized by
contrastive linguistic fields that reflect the disintegration of emotion
and desire, belief and thought. Thus, Paul reflects in Snow White:

I have loftier ambitions, only I don’t know what they are, exactly.
Probably I should go out and effect a liaison with some beauty who needs
me, and save her, and ride away with her flung over the pommel of my
palfrey, I believe I have that right. But on the other hand, this duck-with-
blue-cheese sandwich that I am eating is mighty attractive and absorbing,
too (27-28).

A surplus of clichéd notions and language formulas that are “dead”,


historical ballast, mere form without force, appears to weigh — and
not to weigh — upon the characters and the narrators who are
imprisoned within a behavior that is stymied by the antagonism
between, on the one hand, the ideas of the extraordinary, i.e., the old
belief in heroism or the modern notions of existential alienation and
pain, and, on the other, the “ordinary” life of small irritations and
satisfactions, between the rejection of the ordinary routine and its
acceptance. It is as if the lack of orientation assembles and opposes
contradictory discourses that seem to colonize the characters and
make them and their behavior passive reflectors of contradictory
possibilities expressed in language.
The diagrammatic method of reducing images to facts and of
registering and juxtaposing disconnected items also leads to a
forceful shifting and mixing of viewpoints, and facilitates the overlay
and the interaction of the satiric, ironic, parodic, playful, and comic
modes that all build on a pattern of incongruities, out of which the
force of multiperspective emerges. This superimposition of eva-
luating attitudes is the logical result of the encumbrance of rational
Character 547

thought. Its restriction or loss of validity leaves open and makes


necessary various possibilities of interpretation of equal validity. The
interaction of evaluative perspectives has as a moral starting point the
satiric mode, and, as its end point, the comic perspective, with irony,
parody, and play as modes of mediation. Here one can speak again of
a program of attenuation, of disseminating or deferring one
perspective into the other. There is quite obviously a satirical note in
Barthelme’s texts. But satire is dialectic, needs a deformation and a
value-pole, and this clear-cut opposition of value and non-value is
suspended in postmodern fiction. Thus satire’s indictment of fixities
and definites (Coleridge) is muted by Barthelme, just as is the
expression of emotion. He himself notes that he does not write satire:
“Social satire is of minor importance in the world, but also in what I
do — I am of an ironic turn of mind”. The reason for his rejection of
satire is that “[i]t’s a destructive attack on its object” (Ziegler and
Bigsby 45, 53).
Instead of the seemingly destructive method of satire,
Barthelme prefers parodies of language: “I enjoyed writing them
because I’ve always admired the form at its best” (Bellamy 1974,
48), and, one might add, because he has ironized form at its clichéd
worst. Thus satire is attenuated into irony and parody. Yet irony is
also muted. In Barthelme’s short story “Kierkegaard Unfair to
Schlegel” a dialogue runs as follows: “A: But I love my irony. Q:
Does it give you pleasure? A: A poor ... A rather unsatisfactory” (CL
92). Barthelme himself comments on the function of irony in this
story: “irony is equated with masturbation [...] My conception of
what the story says is that irony is, finally, of not much use” (Ziegler
and Bigsby 46). When satire and irony are muted, space is created for
parody, play, and the comic mode, which may be considered as
attenuations of the stricter perspectives of negativity, satire and
irony, and their forms. The comic mode, all-present in postmodern
texts, aims at a “positivization of negativity” (Warning); it
unburdens, distances itself from norms, demands, rules, the
domination by the terrible and the absurd, and from the non-
commitment of play, the immanence of parody, and the mere
aggressiveness of irony. It is a source of non-directed, goalless
energy, and it complements or replaces what used to be the force of
the character’s desire, feeling, action, and thought with the attitude of
the narrator. The diagrammatic method leaves gaps and disrupts
548 From Modernism to Postmodernism

continuity and causality in order to create space for the exploration of


the hidden possibilities of force, of ambivalent evaluation inherent in
the exhausted system of values and the stereotyped literary tradition,
and thus space for a replenishment of narrative energy, of viewpoints
and methods, by the creation of a contrasting multi-perspective. We
will further discuss this overlap of perspectives, of the satiric, the
grotesque and the comic modes, and their cooperation with play,
irony, and parody, in an extra section at the end of the book.

7.13.2. Minimalism: Richard Brautigan, Renata Adler, Kurt


Vonnegut, Walter Abish, Gilbert Sorrentino

The rise of the behavior-model and the corresponding


diagrammatic method that Barthelme develops to the extreme are not
restricted to his own narrative strategy, but are important ingredients
of postmodern fiction in general. By the juxtaposition of incongruous
items, the reduction of causal and logic links to mere sequential ones,
and the creation of an order of simultaneity, an aesthetic distance is
attained that gains space for the reintroduction of energy by
destroying traditional and rational forms (and introducing ironic,
comic, parodic views). The behavior model and the corresponding
diagrammatic method are extremely important to postmodern writers
like Brautigan, Renata Adler, Vonnegut, and others, because it
allows them the full range of experimentation. Brautigan’s novel A
Confederate General from Big Sur, which is an anti-status-quo novel
set in Big Sur, California, about zany Lee Mellon and Jessee, the
narrator, contains many passages like the following, which disrupt
traditional laws of transition, coherence, meaningfulness:

The alligators bobbed to the top of the pond. It stopped raining. Elizabeth
was wearing a white dress. Lee Mellon scratched his head. Night came. I
said something to Elaine. The pond was quiet like the Mona Lisa (CG
115).

Lee Mellon went and put the dope in the kitchen. Ray Earle shrugged his
shoulders. The rest of the day passed quietly. Elizabeth looked beautiful.
Elaine was nervous. Ray Earle got deeply involved in catching the
alligators (CG 135).

Renata Adler’s novel Speedboat is a non-totalizing, non-


artful collection of fragments and disparate materials, which is
Character 549

largely concerned with language. Character is defined by passivity,


“a willingness to float aimlessly in an ocean of urban flotsam and
technological junk” (Wilde 1981, 155). The characterization of her
social circle exhibits a manner of presentation similar in its diagram-
matic traits though not in some other features to Barthelme’s (Adler’s
Jan Fain has a story and a biography of her own):

We are thirty-five. Some of us are gray. We all do situps or something to


keep fit. I myself wear bifocals. Since I am not yet used to wearing specs
at all, I tend to underestimate the distance required, for instance, for kisses
on the cheek [...]. We have had some drunks, an occasional psychotic
break, eleven divorces, one autistic child, six abortions, two unanticipated
homosexuals, several affairs of the sort that are lifelong and quiet and sad,
one drowning, two cases of serious illness, one hatred each, no crimes. No
crimes is no small thing (SB 148).

To quote its subtitle, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five


is written in a “somewhat [...] telegraphic schizophrenic manner of
tales” that both disconnects the individual situations and (re)connects
them in terms of the simultaneity of discrepant items. The factual
method, whenever it becomes diagrammatical in this book, sketches
long stretches of time in the life of the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim,
who as prisoner of war has survived the fire-bombing of Dresden in
World War II, and — in an injection of science fiction strategies into
the novel — is abducted to an extra-terrestrial planet, Tralfamadore,
where he learns a new way of looking at things, namely that “[a]ll
moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will
exist”, and that one can look “at all the different moments” in a
spatial way, “just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky
Mountains, for instance” (SF 23). In a passage like the following, “all
different moments” are arranged in a “spatial” way; simultaneity as
viewpoint overforms time sequence:

Billy became rich. He had two children, Barbara and Robert. In time, his
daughter married another optometrist, and Billy set him up in business.
Billy’s son Robert had a lot of trouble in high school, but Character 520
From Modernism to Postmodernism then he joined the famous Green
Berets. He straightened out, became a fine young man and he fought in
Vietnam. Early in 1968, a group of optometrists, with Billy among them,
chartered an airplane to fly them from Ilium to an international convention
of optometrists in Montreal. The plane crashed on top of Sugarbush
Mountain, in Vermont. Everybody was killed but Billy. So it goes. While
550 From Modernism to Postmodernism

Billy was recuperating in a hospital in Vermont, his wife died accidentally


of carbon-monoxide poisoning. So it goes (SF 21- 22).

The empty spaces in-between the registered “facts” or items


can expand to a point where the text not only leaves gaps but
willfully obstructs the notions of consistency, coherence,
verisimilitude, logic, and whatever may “normally” pass for
meaning, rendering the imagined world fantastic. In Sorrentino’s
Mulligan Stew, many passages are written in such a radically
incoherent, diagrammatic style. The book itself is a collection of
notebooks, scrapbooks, lists, excerpts from books, stories, stories
within stories, and so on, which stand only in a “diagrammatic”
connection with one another.

Why are these pipples taking their hets off?


They are entering a church. It’s very warm for June. Joe Nameth is
speaking in Ozone Park. The Phillies have won the pennant. God is just.
Itchy foreheads. The flag is passing by. Pope Paul has arrived at second
base. The daughter of Rosie O’Grady has appeared on Ovington avenue. A
rough beast has slouched toward Bethlehem to be born. The sudden
summer shower has ended as quickly as it began. To fill them with yellow
pencils. It’s raining violets. They don’t know no better. Ask a silly
question. The winner has paid $ 93.40. Love’s magic spell is everywhere
(MS 144).

The absence/presence model of emotion and personality that


characterizes behavior-fiction is transferred also to later postmodern
fictions, though the latter mostly attenuate the incongruities of
surface and language and aim at a more coherent but still mini-
malistic style. The narrator in Walter Abish’s novel How German Is
It says of Ulrich’s, the protagonist’s book that he is writing, in a
remark that applies also to Abish’s novel: “The characters in
[Ulrich’s] book can be said to be free of emotional disturbances, free
of emotional impairments. They meet here and there [...] and without
too much time spent analyzing their own needs, allow their brains a
brief respite, as they embrace each other in bed” (HG 16). Though
there are of course parallels to Barthelme’s emotional minimalism,
what is evident, however, quite in accordance with a shift in late
postmodern fiction, is a stronger and different social note. The book
announces that this is not a time for deep emotions and desires, and
by setting “up questions like traps” (HG 5) it points at the “void” that
the consumption of goods and services can neither abolish nor fill.
Character 551

Finally, one should remember that the behavior-attitude is


also an available model for the presentation of the diminishing
authenticity of character in non-minimalistic fiction, where the
character is again reduced, this time to a player of roles, as especially
in John Barth’s novels. As mentioned before, in The End of the Road,
Jakob Horner, suffering from “cosmopsis”, a paralysis of the will,
learns from the black doctor that the human being is an assortment of
roles, of adopted behaviors, of “masks”. But “[d]on’t think there’s
anything behind them: ego means I, and I means ego, and the ego by
definition is a mask” (ER 84-85).

7.14. Action in Fiction

A deed or action according to Hegel is

something simply determined, universal, to be grasped as an abstraction; it


is , theft, or a good action, a brave deed, and so on, and what it is can be
said of it. It is this, and its being is not merely a sign, but the fact itself. It
is this, and the individual human being is what the deed is. In the
simplicity of this being, the individual is for others a universal being who
really is, and who ceases to be something only ‘meant.’ It is true that, in
the deed, he is not explicitly present as Spirit; but when it is a question of
his being qua being, and, on the one hand, the twofold being of bodily
shape and deed are contrasted, each purporting to be what he actually is,
then it is the deed alone that must be affirmed as his genuine being — not
his face or outward appearance, which is supposed to express what he
‘means’ by his deeds, or what anyone might suppose he merely could do.
Similarly, on the other hand, when his performance and his inner
possibility, capacity or intention are contrasted, it is the former alone
which is to be regarded as his true actuality, even if he deceives himself on
the point, and, turning away from his action into himself, fancies that in
this inner self he is something else than what he is in the deed.
Individuality, when it commits itself to the objective element in putting
itself into a deed, does of course risk being altered and perverted. But what
settles the character of the deed is just this: whether the deed is an actual
being that endures, or whether it is merely a fancied performance, that in
itself is nothing at all, and passes away (1977, 194).133

Hegel’s “factual” perspective on action can be


complemented with Aristotle’s “inner” view. According to Aristotle
“[c]haracter gives us qualities, but it is in our actions — what we do
— that we are happy or the reverse” (qtd. in P. Brooks 11).134
Everything Hegel notes about action is controversial in post-
552 From Modernism to Postmodernism

modernism. So is Aristotle’s notion of action, though the postmodern


writer might agree with Aristotle that action would create
[un]happiness if it were feasible. There are at least three episte-
mological reasons that speak against action in postmodern fiction. (1)
The postmodern author is bound to question the view that action is
the character, because it minimalizes the role of consciousness and
reflection in their functions as constitutive factors of character. (2)
He or she also does not consider action an unproblematic notion. The
fact that action is considered self-willed, self-controlled, and
attributable to a moral decision presupposes a self-responsible
character and its verity, which postmodern fiction denies. The single
action is meaningless before the horizon of doubt, the clichédness of
all values, and the fact that the world is “impossibly complex”
(Coover). (3) Furthermore, action would create dissimilarity, in-
equality, and dominance-relationships, while the postmodern author
might tend towards leveling characters and experiences, and
therefore not choose the self-determined system of action, but focus
on decentered areas of operation and make the character a passive
observer of what happens.
Yet if one defines action not as mere fact but as a plural and
ambivalent phenomenon, there are at least five points that speak for a
role of action in the presented network of human relations in the
postmodern fictional world. (1) Though in defining action Hegel is
not interested in complexity, action is in fact ambiguous because, for
instance, it may only appear to be a self-willed and self-controlled
force, but at the same time be in fact willed and predetermined by
society and anonymous powers and thus controlled from outside and
by outside forms of conduct — an ambivalence that can be made
useful in the struggle between necessity and freedom, the supremacy
of the System and the resistance of the character, who can become
paranoiac under the pressure of anonymous Powers, the terroristic
control system of society, as in Pynchon’s novels. (2) Entropy, the
running-down of energy in a closed system, requires “action”,
“doing” as a counterforce, in order for narrative to be able to mark
the depletion of energy, just as the power of the system requires
resistance, resistance of individuals or groups, in order to be
recognized for what it is, as Foucault has rightly noted. (3) Action is
doing. Though action can be a counterforce against entropy, “just
doing” can lead to and support entropy if its regulating forms are
Character 553

emptied of meaning, are no longer controlled by veritable values, or


if the activities become chaotic. It is by “just doing” that the system
rules the world, while the character, resisting power from outside,
would ask the value question, “what is worth doing?” (Gaddis) (4)
The satiric, grotesque, and comic modes need as their target people
who act, act viciously, inhumanly, and laughably. The satiric and the
grotesque views ask the moral question, while, as we will see, the
free comic spirit of the postmodern novel goes beyond it. (5) Action
has also a function, a “minus function” (Lotman) as empty space. If
action is stymied and reduced to mere behavior, the absence of action
(and decision-making) may appear as an (“unnatural”) deficiency
that produces irritation or unhappiness, but it also may call up the
comic and ironic views. The action-phenomenon is thus attached to a
complex framework that requires some more elaboration. There are
at least four problem areas that can be isolated.
(1) Action stands in close relation to reflection. An action is
not just something in itself; it is bound into a dynamic process, has a
story, a phase before the fact, i.e., a preparation, and a phase after, an
evaluation, all of which can complicate the action. In actual fact, this
action story, just like the (narrated) situation, has the nature of a
model. The formal model of the action story has at least four basic
elements: consciousness, temporal structuredness, the factual action
and the result of the process. They are general components,
constitutive categories, abstract conditions of the model, which are
defined in relation to one another and which can be connected (in
changing relations of dominance) in terms of causality, corres-
pondence, interaction, and conditioning. The fully developed pattern
of the action story is what Henry James is master of. Yet on the level
of manifestation, each of these basic components of the action story
can be reduced, dissolved, deleted, or replaced because they are
always present as constituents of the action story, even if they are not
realized. The phases before and after the action can be shortened or
lengthened; reflection and action can work together or not. The
modes of thinking about and executing the action are in a way
incommensurable because consciousness is directed towards the
potential and action towards the actual; this provides tension between
action and reflection, between action and the phases before and after
the action, and between the evaluation of the action before and after
the fact. The role of feeling and desire in the various phases of the
554 From Modernism to Postmodernism

action story additionally complicates the picture to the extent that it


can become a psychological puzzle. In the following sections we will
focus on the relationship between reflection and action, which not
only contrast in the individual case but fundamentally conflictual and
even antagonistic because, as Sartre holds, reflection is a generator of
insecurity, anxiety, endless possibilities, and thus the dead end of
action, which, contrary to reflection, selects only one possibility
among many (a conflict that especially Barth and Pynchon make use
of).
We can further specify the circumstances that cause the
problematic relationship between action and reflection in individual
cases. Violent action is generally spontaneous, uncontrolled and
shuns reflection; it erupts out of the unconscious without
recognizable preparation, motive, or emotional reaction (cf. Hawkes,
The Lime Twig), though there are of course reasons for it.
Conversely, in the case of indecision or confusion, reflection may
expand, become an obstacle and a barrier in the preparatory phase
when the character does not know what to do or how to do
something; and it may turn into a burden afterwards when the actor
sees a discrepancy between expectation and result or does not know
how to evaluate, or even to what source to attribute the action.
Furthermore, not only the lack or expansion of reflection in the
action story but also the whole scenario, the chosen framework,
influence the orientation of action and the kind of reduction it may
suffer. Either the self with its problems of dividedness and self-
alienation, or the situation with a self that is not, or no longer, in
control can be accentuated, though none of the two can be eliminated
from consideration. The action story in both cases includes action
and reflection, as well as feeling and emotional disposition. This
disposition presupposes and directs the choice of one of the human
constants as frame of reference, either confidence in rationality, or
anxiety and insecurity. This has consequences for the process of the
action story, as has the suppression of, or compensation for, tension,
disquiet, and angst by irony, play, and the comic mode. The
multiplicity of viewpoints and the failure to establish clear-cut causal
relations, to attribute causes, motives, and values to what happens,
lead to the fantastication of action.
(2) Being part of a larger entity, of an action story, i.e., never
being self-contained and “alone”, action always needs interpretation
Character 555

before and after the fact. Action may even be said to be a construct of
interpretation since it has to fit into psychological and social
contexts. Not only can the preparatory phase of the action story be a
problem for the realization of the action by raising doubts and
uncertainties, so can the phase afterwards, the evaluation of the
action, which in hindsight may diminish the action’s value. (This is
one of the reasons why Stencil does not aim at an end of his quest for
Lady V., for its ending would open the evaluation phase). The
motives, the direction, and the results of an action can hardly ever be
completely foreseen or afterwards explained because, in Gass’s
words from The Tunnel, “[t]he consequences of our actions escape
our intentions” (323). Since plan and result of the action are not the
same, can actually be divergent, they may be contrasted after the act.
How the relation between intention and outcome is appraised in
hindsight by the acting subject or the narrator, as desire and
fulfillment or desire and failure, depends on the assessment of the
genesis of the particular action, of the play of cause and effect, and
on the attribution of power and resistance to specific determinants.
Intention, action, and result and their coordination may be attributed
to different sources and aims, may be made the responsibility of the
self, of others, of necessity or chance. This openness in assigning
causes and origins to action complicates the relationship between
character and action, especially in postmodern fiction, the more so
since not only origins and aims, causes and effects may split or
multiply, but the subject itself, the seeming master of the action
story, may also split or multiply. The self of an acting character can
be altered and perverted by the action carried out, as it were, against
its will or under circumstances that run counter to expectations.
Differences emerge from the preference given to the acting self or
the conscious, reflecting self. As Hegel argues, action creates an
identity of the self for others; yet this outer self might not be
considered the true self by the acting character, who thinks itself
truly defined only by its inner life, by consciousness. And its inner
life may have various selves. The attribution of action and reflection
to one single self thus might be false, for the self multiplies. In “Lost
in the Funhouse”, for instance, Ambrose reflects on the question of
what the I is: “You think you’re yourself, but there are other persons
in you. Ambrose gets hard, when Ambrose doesn’t want to, and
556 From Modernism to Postmodernism

obversely. Ambrose watches them disagree; Ambrose watches him


watch” (LF 81).
Frames of reference for action outside the self, for the
attribution of origin and goal, cause and effect, are necessity and
chance. Billy Pilgrim in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five learns
from the Tralfamadorians that there is no free will, only necessity, or
rather (since such a statement is already an evaluation of the form of
existence) that a question like “Why me? [...] is a very Earthling
question to ask [...] Why you? Why us for that matter? Why
anything? Because the moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs
trapped in amber? [...] Well, here we are [...] trapped in the amber of
this moment. There is no why” (SF 66). But for an Earthling there are
the why-questions that cannot be avoided; they lead to uncertainty, a
wavering between the void, chance, necessity, and freedom as frames
of making sense. Ebenezer Cooke in Barth’s The Sot-weed Factor
reflects about the void: “I wonder: What moral doth the story hold?
Is’t that the universe is vain? The chaste and consecrated life a
hollow madness? Or is’t that what the cosmos lacks we must
ourselves supply?” (SWF 670) Kohler in Gass’s The Tunnel notes:
“beneath the surface of life is the pit, the abyss, the awful truth, a
truth that cannot be lived with, that cannot be abided: human
worthlessness” (Tun 197). In her attempt to understand the world,
Oedipa in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 finally faces the void:
“[T]his, oh God, was the void. There was nobody who could help
her” (CoL 128). Contingency, universal chance, is the other frame
that is placed outside human responsibility. For the presentation of
history Coover uses, in The Public Burning, “[d]esign as game.
Randomness as design” (PB 190). Sukenick writes, “[t]ime is no
longer purposive, and so there is no destiny, only chance” (DN 41).
In his novel, suggestively called Out (of norms, conventions, order,
determinacy), he uses a dialogic exchange of positions to counter the
reader’s expectation of logical coherence: “You pursue essentials. I
ride with the random [...] You struggle toward stillness I rest in
movement” (127). Elkin notes in an already quoted statement “that
the world spins on an axis made out of whim, just pure whim. The
ultimate whimmer is God” (Ziegler and Bigsby 102). In the author’s
words, his fiction itself “is completely arbitrary and whimsical”
(Ziegler and Bigsby 104). God in The Living End destroys the world
out of whim, out of the feeling that the art of His creation has not
Character 557

been appreciated enough. Jack Gibbs in Gaddis’s novel JR writes a


book “about random patterns and mechanizing” (JR 147), thus
mirroring what is at the heart of Gaddis’s fiction, “precisely this
courage to live without Absolutes, which is, really, nothing more
than growing up, the courage to accept a relative universe and even
one verging upon chance” (Abadi-Nagy 77). Moreover, to quote
Jerzy Kosinski: “With a true sense of the randomness of life’s
moments man is at peace with himself — and that peace is
happiness” (Cahill 142). In a combination of necessity and accident,
the Tralfamadorians in Slaughterhouse-Five will, so it is pre-
ordained, accidentally blow up the world while experimenting with a
new rocket fuel.
Since chance is an “empty” category that denies the
“meaningful” attribution of responsibility for acting or, for that
matter, suffering, the responsibility for what happens can be instead
assigned to the intrigues of anonymous power-systems whose
activities are anti-humanistic and forestall, by suspending or
abandoning self-chosen action, the realization of the character as an
authentic, unique ego. Ebenezer Cooke in Barth’s The Sot-Weed
Factor makes the point: “Faith, ’tis a rare wise man knows who he is
[...] Did I, then, make a choice? Nay, for there was no I to make it.
’Twas the choice made me” (SWF 71). To Mucho, the salesman of
used cars in Pynchon’s Lot 49, people are not themselves but parts of
a mechanized system. The trade-ins of his customers are like
“motorized, metal extensions of themselves, of their families and
what their whole lives must be like [...] each owner, each shadow,
filed in only to exchange a dented, malfunctioning version of himself
for another, just as futureless, automotive projection of somebody
else’s life. As if it were the most natural thing” (CoL 4-5). As
mentioned before, anonymous “Forces” outside generate in post-
modern fiction an all-encompassing, “mythicized” “They-System”
(Pynchon, V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow; Sorrentino,
Mulligan Stew), or a “terroristic universe” (Hawkes in Bellamy 1974,
112), or “a dark universe of wounded galaxies and novia
conspiracies” (Burroughs 1962b, 99). Freedom of action and moral
choice are scarcely an issue for much of postmodern fiction. They are
reserved for the imagination.
Generated by coincidence or under the control of outside
systems, actions become “unreal”; they are fantasized. What would
558 From Modernism to Postmodernism

be seen from the inside as an action turns into indifferent


circumstances when looked at from the outside: it takes the shape of
an event (not in Heidegger’s existential sense of the self-coming-to-
itself, but as something that just happens). Action and event are then
exchangeable and may turn into mere behavior. (We will come back
to this point later in the discussion of the perspectives of evaluation
at the end of the book.) While actions and events can both be good or
bad for a person or a society, only actions, not events, can be “right”
or “wrong” in a moral sense. The predominance of events and
behavior complicates and reduces the interrelation of aesthetics and
ethics in the text. The uncertainty, the randomness of existence, the
non-answerability of the why-question, life without absolutes, even
without a social system of moral values, renders the interpretation of
the world wide open to a multiplicity of attitudes, to play, irony, and
parody, to evaluations by the satiric and grotesque perspectives and a
new kind of free comic mode, all of which can combine and mutually
relativize one another in a quite new, postmodern way that was not
available to modern literature, perhaps with the partial exception of
Kafka, Joyce, and Faulkner. We will use war-novels of a new kind,
with their strangely distancing view of violence, especially Heller’s
Catch 22, to discuss the various modes of evaluation and their
interplay in postmodern fiction in more detail later.
(3) The quotidian world knows of another kind of action, for
which Hegel does not provide, but that the theory of action has
noted.135 It is the action performed every day. There is obviously a
difference between the innovative, provocative action that trans-
gresses borderlines and redefines the old in terms of the new, and the
praxis-oriented, preservative action that promotes and protects
community and includes the new into the old. The first kind of action
is more self-oriented, the second stabilizes the character’s place in
the every-day world and the communication between individual and
society. Not only has the individualizing and existential kind of
action often been suspended in postmodern fiction, but also so has
the praxis-oriented one. Both have fallen victim, as it were, to the
postmodern appearance-disappearance paradigm. The praxis-oriented
action has lost its meaning with the questioning of communication. It
seems that communal action has become irrelevant with the loss of
significance that convention, tradition, societal rules, and regulations,
but also the routines of everydayness, suffered. Everydayness was
Character 559

supplied and understood in the novel of the nineteenth century in


terms of the “natural”, the endless diversity of human conduct, the
variable mixtures of “causally necessary and socially conventional
behavior”, where “[c]hoices and contingencies” connect in “going to
a restaurant, taking a trip, frying an egg, greeting a friend, going to a
movie” (W. Martin, Recent Theories 67), by “situational”, or
“instrumental scripts” (Schank and Abelson 64-65) and conventional
practices in general, of which every culture has a stock repertoire,
endlessly variable in the individual text. An important reason for the
abandonment of this kind of action, of the “vraisemblage” and social
authenticity of the world of the quotidian, is the growing value of
sophistication and reflection; and this emphasis on consciousness and
its mental activities isolates the self from others. Reflection and
sophistication make people aware of the fact that even the kind of
daily action to which they are used includes aporias. It cancels its
satisfying and liberating effect by repetition. With growing matter-
of-factness and “naturalness”, it becomes routinized and loses its
potential to satisfy, to make happy in Aristotle’s terms, and to
individualize; it stimulates the desire for change.
(4) And there is a further issue. R. S. Crane has extended and
differentiated the idea of plot by distinguishing “plots of action”,
“plots of character”, and “plots of thought” (620). In analogy to the
plot of thought, one might speak of an action of thought that follows
its own logic, has again its own story, is dramatized and builds its
own authentic gestalt, as was demonstrated above. And in analogy to
both action and action of thought one might claim an action of the
imagination that creates the fictional world, with or without conflicts
and drama but always with power-resistance, form-force
relationships. In postmodern fiction, this productive process of the
imagination, the creation of the story, is often styled as action and set
beside or against (meta-)reflection, which again is conceived of as
action, and both may be set against the “real” or actual action, a lack
of which in the story may be considered a failure. In Barth’s “The
Life Story”, the writer/protagonist “clung onto his narrative
depressed by the disproportion of its ratiocination to its drama-
tization, reflection to action” (LF 123); and in the title story “Lost in
the Funhouse” the narrator comes to the conclusion: “There’s no
point in going farther; this isn’t getting anybody anywhere; they
haven’t even come to the funhouse yet” (LF 80). In Pynchon’s V., the
560 From Modernism to Postmodernism

reflection of the protagonist is full of conflicts that pushes on the


action of the quest because the activity must not end; its ending
would mean entropy, death. Reflection as action may interpret and
dramatize suicidal action as in Hawkes’s Travesty and Barth’s
“Night-Sea Journey”. Both the harmony and the antagonism between
“true” action and reflection as action are most obvious when an “I”
narrator, as in the two cases mentioned, experiences the crisis of his
life, confronts death. One might say quite generally that the more the
human freedom to choose, necessary for concrete self-responsible
action, is doubted, and the latter problematized or abandoned, the
more the action is transferred to the creative processes of imagination
and reflection. They are both dramatized, in agreement with, or
against, one another, and adopt the form of (futile) action, the action
to produce the artifact. It is an activity which develops, so to speak,
its own conflictual story, with (doubting, frustrating)
reflexive/emotional phases before and after (the success or failure of)
the creative act(s).
Five texts will demonstrate different possibilities of
interconnecting action, desire, emotion, and reflection in the post-
modern American novel. Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar sets
passion/action/ violence against the entropy of a static life that has
eliminated conflict. Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor starts with the
divorce of reflection and action in what he calls cosmopsis, a
blockage of the will. The ideology of keeping one’s distance to the
world in order not to lose one’s innocence by involvement in its
impurities is exchanged at the end for the fusion of action and
emotion in acts of solidarity and compassion, a development that
then again is ironized by another turn that demonstrates the limitation
of the human will and the cruelty of events. Pynchon’s The Crying of
Lot 49 places action in the context of mystery and paranoia, of order
and disorder, and splits it into self-willed questing and incidental
drifting, submitting to the randomness of life. In Gaddis’s fantastic
business novel, JR, action deteriorates to the business maxim of “just
doing”. Mere unreflected business activities, directed exclusively
towards material gain and personal power, are confronted with the
question “what is worth doing?” The two mottos problematize the
contrast between chaos and order, society and art, relativizing
business by art and art by business. And finally, Ishmael Reed’s
Mumbo Jumbo exemplifies the use of Voodoo aesthetics to represent
Character 561

action as life force, as a challenge to (dead) Western History, and as


a subversion of repressive, death-driven, white cultural forms and
values.

7.14.1. Behavior Against Action: Richard Brautigan, In


Watermelon Sugar

Brautigan bases his novel on the antagonism between


behavior and action and employs a full-scale model of life and force,
including passion and violence to ironize satirically and playfully a
reduced model of well-regulated, communal behavior. Drained of
emotion, desire and action, the ideological worldview of order
approaches the status of entropy, of the inanimate. The novel
presents a pastoral idyll, allusively called iDEATH, where everything
has become inanimate, indeed is made of watermelon sugar: houses,
books, graves, statues, food, fuel; even “[o]ur lives we have carefully
constructed from watermelon sugar” (WS 1). Though death is not
eliminated, it is made beautiful. The dead rest in glass coffins on the
bottom of the river with foxfire inside “so that they glow at night and
we can appreciate what comes next” (WS 60). Everything that might
stir thoughts of old times, like books and paintings, and the machines
that might revive action, competition, and strife, are heaped up in the
“Forgotten Works”. People seem to live in harmony and satisfaction.
Emotions and actions are reduced to the gentle life of behavior
without psychological depth, without questionings, without past and
future. Love and pain that might intensify life and cause a person to
act individually are neither known nor understood. But there are
built-in signs of disruption and dissatisfaction. A violent drunk,
inBOIL, and his gang defect from the gentle life, and desire to revive
action and emotion. Maintaining that the tigers, whose violence was
formerly a threat to the community, are the real iDEATH, while the
“unity” and “wholeness” of the gentle life is only material and
mechanical in kind, they commit violent action against themselves,
cutting themselves into pieces in front of the disgusted inmates of
iDEATH. Their action, however, is as meaningless in this context of
undisturbable “peace” as Margaret’s suicide out of the desire for a
love that is no longer reciprocated by the man she loves and is in fact
quite contrary to the rule. The narrator, her former lover, who
watches her hang herself on an apple tree, does not understand much
562 From Modernism to Postmodernism

but deep down obviously feels a lack and a desire for a different life,
since he does not sleep well and is in the habit of taking long walks
at night for no given reason. His inner disturbance can be included
into the gentle life because it is also reduced to “behavior” and does
not explode into open feeling or individual action. In this book the
(emotional and intellectual) whole of a person has been replaced by a
partial being that becomes fantastically fixed. Beauty has been
devitalized, harmony turned into entropy. Desire, emotion, and action
are here seen as personal and therefore in this kind of gentle-life
community as anti-social, but, paradoxically even in their
fantasticality, they are the only “real” things there are.
Wherever else in postmodern fiction beauty, harmony and
peace are suggested by a quiet surface of life — for instance in the
extra-terrestrial alternative world of the Tralfamadorians, who
cherish harmony and happiness grounded on the surrender of
variability, individuality, and personal action in Vonnegut’s
Slaughterhouse-Five — they are, with only a few exceptions,
unfavorably contrasted with the life and force principles of vitality,
struggle, and movement, which have become, in one way or another,
together with the life force of the imagination, the main positive
frames of reference, as many of the exemplary texts that we
discussed and will discuss prove. The high esteem given in
postmodern fiction to the dynamics of difference, movement, strug-
gle, to energy, fluidity, and chaos, to dissemination, deferral, and
multiplicity, of course corresponds to the general trend of
deconstructionism, to the aesthetics of “crisis”, “displacement”,
“absence”, “violence”, or “madness”, to the principles of movement,
nomadism, endless deferral of meaning, asserted by Foucault,
Derrida, Lyotard, and Deleuze-Guattari. It is one of the basic ironies
of postmodern fiction that the life-principle that manifests itself in
action can only be concretized within the reductive forms of the
system, in acts of obsession and paranoia, in self-reflexive acts of the
imagination, or, ex negativo, in devitalized forms of behavior that are
fantasized into sterile irreality and appear to signify the loss of the
sense for action.
Character 563

7.14.2. Active Participation Against Passive Distance: John


Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor

In The Sot-Weed Factor, action is opposed to passivity, and


the two are related to experience/participation and
innocence/distance respectively, as they are also in Gass’s
Omensetter’s Luck, which we discussed above. Just like Pynchon’s
novels, Barth’s narratives are heavily plotted, making, however, “the
artificial element in art”, “the artifice part of the point” (qtd. in
Scholes 1967, 137), i.e., emphasizing the artifice of plot, of actions
and events that play an important role in the composition of the book.
The excessive, “flabberghasting plot” of Barth’s The Sot-Weed
Factor sends Ebenezer Cooke, the “wandering hero” of the book,
from England to America to become poet laureate of Maryland and
makes him live through many adventures, hopes, and disappoint-
ments, without, however, any significant results, since plot with
Barth “doesn’t rise by meaningful steps but winds upon itself,
digresses, retreats, hesitates, sighs, collapses, expires” (LF 92). It is
fantasized in order to keep “the plural of a text” intact: “everything
signifies ceaselessly and several times, but without being delegated
to a great final ensemble, an ultimate structure” (Barthes 1974, 11-
12).
The book is again about the fall from innocence to
experience. Similar to Gass’s Omensetter’s Luck, the fall is
necessary, is part of human destiny, but contrary to Gass’s book, this
fall, which entails involvement in human affairs, is deemed positive
and enriching — to a certain extent. The choice the protagonist faces
is to persist in “innocence”, aloofness, distance and passivity, or to
engage in the world with compassion, love, and action. He lives in a
constant contradiction between his own ideas, which turn out to be
quixotic fictions, and the actual situations he finds himself in. At the
beginning of the novel he is undecided, equally attracted by many
possibilities, happy to drift along with the “tide of change”. He
constitutes “consistently no special sort of person” (21) and suffers
like Jake Horner in The End of the Road from “cosmopsis”, i.e., a
paralysis of the will. In spite of all parody of patterns, also of the
traditional character model, Barth makes use of the concept of the
full-grown person by having the protagonist Ebenezer Cooke
undergo a development and maturation in which he learns com-
564 From Modernism to Postmodernism

passion, participates in the feeling of pain, and exercises solidarity


with his fellows. At the end Ebenezer realizes and admits the pain his
innocence has caused (“That is the crime I stand indicted for” [788]),
and, in order to share pain and happiness, he marries the syphilitic
and pox-ridden whore Joan Toast, who fills a multiplicity of roles by
being his first and only love and at the same time “no woman but
womankind”. Captured by the Indians, he also shows compassion in
a broader sense. He takes on an active role by supporting others,
when, instead of saving himself, he risks his own life to save his
companions. By crossing the borderline towards self-willed and self-
controlled action, an active commitment to social responsibility,
Ebenezer surrenders his “innocence”, i.e., his lack of engagement in
the world and also his (aesthetic) “aloofness” from the limitations of
the world, maintaining as inner values, however, innocence and
aloofness. Thus he remains split. Indecisive reflection accompanies
his actions. The phase after the fact is defined by doubt. He
articulates this ambivalence in both a comicalizing and serious
fashion: “a voice in me cries, ‘Down with’t [innocence], then!’ while
another stands in awe before the enterprise; sees in the vain
construction [innocence] all nobleness allowed to fallen men” (670).
This is an ambivalent view of what Barth calls his “notion of
the theme” of the novel, i.e., the dramatization in comic terms of “a
kind of tragic view of innocence”. In fact, “Cooke’s progress through
the novel — the loss of his estate and his regaining it by contracting a
social disease — is meant to dramatize, in a comic way, the
ambivalence of innocence. [...] One could dramatize the tragic view
of experience as well! The affirmation of either as a value is at best a
paradoxical and tenuous enterprise” (Ziegler and Bigsby 18). The
tragic view of experience is based on the fact that the character
stands between equal values, and, in spite of their equal worth, can
choose only one, thereby violating the other, in this case either the
purity of the non-acting self or the mingling with, and acting in, the
world. The comic view of innocence points to the fact that there is,
however, no choice, that personal non-activity and (unsocial)
innocence cannot be preserved, since the human being exists in a
world of experience. The final ironic turn of course is that the
necessary involvement in the world does not establish meaning
anyway, because all self-responsible action is nullified by the super
power of (outside) events — or so it seems.
Character 565

The uncertainty created by the rivalry between


innocence/reticence and experience/involvement in life is confirmed
by the end of the book. Considering the end, one might say that Barth
in fact makes the “action story”, the interchange of phases of action
and reflection, the model that the book itself follows in its
composition. After the narrative imagination has acted out its
specific, pre-ordained plot, including the end, the text, in a phase of
after- and self-reflection, offers a new and different combination, as
it were, and corrects the result. The seemingly happy ending of the
novel (the marriage between Ebenezer and Joan Toast and his
maturing into a person, not only a poet) is suspended in another
winding of the plot upon itself, inscribed in an “apology”, which
opens the novel again. The end, instead of reaping the fruits of self-
willed action and the satisfaction of reflection, is marked by violent
events. Almost all the personnel of the book either vanish or die
brutal, sudden deaths. Thus we find ourselves placed in yet another
frame, a concluding parody, or rather, an inversion of the closed,
happy ending of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel marked
by action, as well as of the novel of education, and of what Fiedler
calls “the Sentimental Love Religion” in which “the Pure Young Girl
replaces Christ as the savior”, and “marriage becomes the equivalent
of bliss eternal” (Fiedler 1960, 10-11). Yet — and that is the most
important result — through all convolutions and all discourses, in an
overall paradoxical turn, the plot demonstrates that “simple” human
values like charity, sacrifice, love, and heroism, i.e., the “active”
values of communication and care, remain in themselves untouchable
by irony, though their discourses may be ironized. These qualities are
in fact the values that define humanity, whatever their historical
“framing” or their purpose, their success or their failure or their
narrative perspective.

7.14.3 Action, Drifting, Reflection: Thomas Pynchon, The Crying


of Lot 49

The Crying of Lot 49 is an exemplary case of how the action-


rich detective novel can be transformed by postmodern fiction. The
traditional pattern of the detective novel leads detective and plot from
uncertainty to certainty; this design is here reversed by starting with
certainty and ending with uncertainty. But Pynchon goes a step
566 From Modernism to Postmodernism

further. Not only does he reverse the roles of certainty and uncer-
tainty, but he also weakens the ability of the characters to act.
Uncertainty undermines the force of initiative, of self-willed action,
muting them into incidental, forceless drifting, and reflection.
Uncertainty originates from ambivalence and multi-valence of all
that happens. Order is counterbalanced with disorder, the “normal”
with the “other”, the attempt to act with entropy.136 The book is an
exemplary postmodern case of the intricate interplay of the
frustration and rebellion experienced by the quester, frustration at the
entropic social processes, and rebellion against the “system”, as well
as the combination, even fusion, of action, symbolic perception,
reflection and reaction to outer events. Outer clues and events both
stimulate and obstruct Oedipa’s quest for the underground Tristero
communication system, which would be a lively alternative to the
stifling conventional world of the bourgeois middle class that she
leaves behind. The diffusion and evaporation of the Tristero, the
quest’s target, impedes action and calls up reflection. There is
scarcely a better case than this book for illustrating how action, the
method of accomplishing something, becomes an object of reflection,
not a deed but an issue for the self-definition of character and its
failure, and a medium for the theme of communication.
After having been made an executor of the will of her dead,
former lover Pierce Inverarity, together with the actor-turned-lawyer
Metzger, the heroine, Oedipa Maas, while collecting information
about the Inverarity estate, meets any number of signs, clues,
revelations that point to the secret activities of an underground
communication system, called Tristero. Driven by her active
temperament, her extreme emotional state of mind, her symbolic
mode of perception, and her propensity for thinking in terms of
analogy, Oedipa is not only a gatherer of information, but also a
“borderer”, somebody moving to the “edge”, standing“ on a border-
line invisible, but yet at its crossing, between worlds” (Vine 228).
Her quest alienates her from her accustomed sphere of bourgeois
normalcy and opens another world, yet it does not point to a safe or
even recognizable alternative. It demands action and is therefore
labeled in terms of action, but a kind of “muted” action (“muted” is a
keyword of the book). There is in fact a disparity between her
energetic quest for enlightenment, i.e., her attempt to meet with all
the people that might be of help in her attempt at clarification, and
Character 567

then her letting the quest go, her drifting through space and time,
“anxious that her revelation not expand beyond a certain point, lest,
possibly, it grow larger than she and assume her to itself” (125).
What might grow larger than she is the confrontation with the
“Other”, her obsession with the idea that “here were God knew how
many citizens, deliberately choosing not to communicate by U.S.
Mail”, in a “calculated withdrawal, from the life of the Republic,
from its machinery” (92).
The novel follows an intricate pattern of acting and drifting.
Actions and events meet in such strange forms that the text often
marks them with the words “odd” or “curious”. At the beginning of
her adventures, it is indeed an outside event, a letter from a law firm
in Los Angeles, naming her an executor of Inverarity’s will, that
draws her out of a life of routine. The odd mixture of self-willed
action that stands for freedom, and outside incidents that break into
her life, unbidden and unforeseen, fantasizes the situation and adds
an ironic, even comic perspective to what she does. This holds true
already of the beginning. At the motel “Echo Courts” (14), Oedipa
meets Metzger, her co-executor of Inverarity’s will, who becomes
her new lover. She prepares for the Strip Botticelli game that they
agree on as part of an “elaborate, seduction, plot” (18) by putting on
all the clothes she can find, but is interrupted in her doings in the
bathroom by “a can of hair spray” that hits the floor and is propelled
“with a great outsurge of pressure”, “hissing malignantly”,
“bounc[ing] off the toilet and whizz[ing] by Metzger’s right ear,
missing by maybe a quarter of an inch” (22-23). When she is ready
with her dress ensemble (which mirrors in the layers of her
alternating clothes her alternative selves), making love turns into a
confusion of activity and passivity, of action and event. She “fell on
[Metzger], began kissing him to wake him up”, falls then herself
asleep only to wake up “at last to find herself getting laid” (26). The
climax of their sexual encounter again marks a curious interface of
actions and events: “Her climax and Metzger’s, when it came,
coincided with every light in the place, including the TV tube,
suddenly going out, dead, black. It was a curious experience. The
Paranoids [members of a band] had blown a fuse” (27). And the
following chapter starts: “Things then did not delay in turning
curious” (28).
568 From Modernism to Postmodernism

Oedipa’s quest calls for action, and action manifests itself in


three ways. (1) It takes her to an encounter with the elementary
domains of energy and nature. She moves along the freeway, with an
“illusion of speed, freedom, wind in your hair, unreeling landscape”
(14) and makes a trip, together with Metzger and “the Paranoids”, a
group of rock musicians that play the role of hipsters and cross
Oedipa’s path several times, to the Pacific. She believes “in some
principle of the sea as redemption for South California [...] the true
Pacific stayed inviolate and integrated or assumed the ugliness at any
edge into some more general truth” (37). This is the least important
sphere of action. (2) She looks up all kinds of people who might
know about the object of her quest, the Tristero communication
system, and asks directly, in fact presses her dialogue partners, for
information. But she fails to make progress because the men she had
hoped to get help from either die or turn mad. (3) Finally, the active
quest is complemented by drifting, which ironically provides her
with more clues than her energetic, self-willed action, though she still
does not get the knowledge that would clarify what she is searching
for. Drifting is in fact a mixture of event and action, order and
disorder, “reality” and hallucination, entropy and negentropy. They
intensely intermix in Oedipa’s quest, until the nature of all activity
becomes blurred, strewn with riddles, distortions, and misin-
formation, and the role she plays turns deceptive and confused, in
danger to end in entropy or madness.137
Some more details are needed to demonstrate the systematic
way Pynchon handles action, drifting, and event and their
interrelation in the description of Oedipa’s quest for the Tristero
Underground System, a search that is characterized by the repeated
encounter of the sign of the muted posthorn and the WASTE symbol.
Feeling “as if there were revelation in progress all around her”, “she
and Metzger drifted into a strange bar known as The Scope” (29), “a
haunt for electronics assembly people from Yoyodyne” (30), a giant
industrial concern that Inverarity partly owns, a place where she
meets Mike Fallopian of the Peter Pinguid Society, who “was doing a
history of private mail delivery in the US”, regarding its “vigorous
suppression” by the “federal government” as “a parable of power, its
feeding, growth and systematic abuse” (35); he becomes one of her
informants and discussion-partners. In ‘The Scope’ she hears the
“Mail call” of what looks like an “inter-office mail run” (34) but
Character 569

turns out to be a secret letter-exchange service for the Peter Pinguid


Society, “named for the commanding officer of the Confederate man-
of-war ‘Disgruntled’” (31). The society is “against industrial
capitalism” (33) and uses “Yoyodyne’s inter-office delivery” (35) to
keep in touch. At the latrine wall of the bar, she reads, “among
lipstick obscenities”, “the following [odd] message”: “Interested in
sophisticated fun? You, hubby, girl friends. The more the merrier.
Get in touch with Kirby, through WASTE only, Box 7391, L.A”. ;
beneath the notice “was a symbol she’d never seen before, a loop,
triangle and trapezoid” (34) that looks like a muted posthorn.
During a guided tour at the Yoyodyne stockholder meeting
that she attends, she gets lost and “came on one Stanley Koteks”
(60), who lectures her on the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and
the Nefastis Machine (based on “Maxwell’s Demon’s” activity, i.e., a
kind of sorting, perpetual-motion machine), which provides
thermodynamic energy by mental activity and is constructed to
outwit the Second Law of Thermodynamics and to avoid entropy.
The people who can work with it, are “[o]nly people with the gift.
‘Sensitives,’ John [Nefastis] calls them” (63). Oedipa feels that “all
with Yoyodyne was normal. Except right here, where Oedipa Maas,
with a thousand other people to choose from, had had to walk
uncoerced into the presence of madness” (62-63). Yet strangely
enough, she learns from Stanley Koteks how to pronounce the word
WASTE: “It’s W.A.S.T.E. [for “We Await Silent Tristero’s
Empire”], lady, [...] an acronym, not ‘waste,’ and we had best not go
into it any further” (63). Mike Fallopian in the bar “The Scope” tells
her, “[s]ure this Koteks is part of some underground [...] an
underground of the unbalanced, possibly, but then how can you
blame them for being maybe a little bitter?” (63) A by-now
“sensitized” (66) Oedipa visits the “Vesperhaven House, a home for
senior citizens that Inverarity had put up” (65) and speaks with the 91
year-old Mr. Thoth about the Pony express and a curious incident of
1853 she found noted on a historical marker, a battle between “a
dozen Wells Fargo men” and “a band of masked marauders in
mysterious black uniforms” (64). She notices that the old man wears
a ring from his grandfather with the “WASTE symbol” (67). She
furthermore meets with Genghis Cohen, a stamp dealer who has been
asked to appraise Inverarity’s stamp collection and has found strange
“irregularities”, actually “deliberate mistake[s]” (71), in the details of
570 From Modernism to Postmodernism

the stamp images: for instance on “a U.S. commemorative stamp, the


Pony Express issue of 1940, 3 ¢ henna brown. Cancelled”, whose
watermark had “her WASTE symbol, showing up black, a little right
of center” (69-70). And Oedipa sees that “[d]ecorating each corner
of” an old German stamp is “the legend Thurn and Taxis”, “a horn
with a single loop in it. Almost like the WASTE symbol. ‘A post
horn,’ Cohen said; ‘the Thurn and Taxis symbol. It was in their coat
of arms’” (70). And the post horn is “a mute”. Her conclusion is:
“The black costumes, the silence, the secrecy. Whoever they were
their aim was to mute the Thurn and Taxis post horn” (70).
Oedipa first hears the name “Trystero” at a performance of
The Courier’s Tragedy by Richard Wharfinger, a play from the
seventeenth century, in which violent actions and events cross each
other to form a fantastic, melodramatic plot with good guys and bad
guys. In the play Trystero makes known that which cannot be said or
known under the tyrannical Duke Angelo; the play calls forth a look
from people “so obviously in on something” (55). The Trystero
assassins kill the rightful heir of the adjacent Dukedom of Fagio,
Niccolò, and reveal that the mysterious destiny of the Lost Guard
who “all vanished without a trace” (47) was death by the order of the
evil Duke Angelo. It remains unclear who put the mysterious
Trystero lines (uttered by Gennaro, played by the director of the
performance, Randy Driblette) into the play, and thus corrupted the
established text: “No hallowed skein of stars can ward, I trow /
Who’s once been set his tryst with Trystero” (52). In order to clarify
her enigmatic clues, Oedipa looks up Driblette and afterwards
wonders about “how accidental it [the conversation] had been” (57).
She sees Professor Emory Bortz, an expert on the play and its editor,
and goes back to Zapf’s Used Book Store, where she bought her
copy of the play for more information, only to find it burnt down.
She compares various editions, one of which, hers, mentions
“Trystero”, while others do not; she thinks about the Trystero thing
“until everything she saw, smelled, dreamed, remembered, would
somehow come to be woven into The Tristero” (58). The history of
The Tristero that she finally patches together from various sources
comes to the following: “[I]t had opposed the Thurn and Taxis postal
system in Europe [since the sixteenth century]; its symbol was a
muted post horn; sometime before 1853 it had appeared in America
and fought the Pony Express and Wells, Fargo, either as outlaws in
Character 571

black, or disguised as Indians; and it survived today, in California,


serving as a channel of communication for those of unorthodox
sexual persuasion, inventors who believed in the reality of Maxwell’s
Demon, possibly her own husband, Mucho Maas” (80). “Their entire
emphasis now [was] toward silence, impersonation, opposition
masquerading as allegiance” (130). Oedipa is ready for “all manner
of revelations”, “some promise of hierophany” (18),138 for the signi-
ficance of repetition, because “it seemed that a pattern was beginning
to emerge, having to do with the mail and how it was delivered” (64).
During her odyssey through San Francisco in chapter five, which
brings her closer to a sense of the Tristero system’s reality, she both
goes forward and hesitates, a state of mind finding its expression in
drifting:

Either Trystero did exist, in its own right, or it was being presumed,
perhaps fantasied by Oedipa, so hung up on and interpenetrated with the
dead man’s estate. Here in San Francisco, away from all tangible assets of
that estate [San Narciso], there might still be a chance of getting the whole
thing to go away and disintegrate quietly. She had only to drift tonight at
random, and watch nothing happen, to be convinced it was purely nervous,
a little something for her shrink to fix. She got off the freeway at North
Beach, drove around, parked finally in a steep side-street among
warehouses. Then walked along Broadway, with the first crowds of
evening. But it took her no more than an hour to catch sight of a muted
posthorn (80, my emphasis).

In the process of her drifting in the crowd, she “found herself


being herded, along with other badged citizens, toward a bar called
The Greek Way”, which she entered, “recalling how she had decided
to drift tonight” (81), only to hear from a member the history of the
IA, the “Inamorati Anonymous” (83), a society of isolates committed
to non-love or rather to defending themselves against the pain of
love, using for identification “a pin in the shape of the Trystero
posthorn. Mute and everything” (81). This group, the IA, was
founded by a “Yoyodyne executive” when he “found himself [...]
automated out of a job” (83) and left by his wife. After this en-
counter, in a paradoxical combination of questing and drifting,
Oedipa “entered the city again, the infected city” (86), where she
“spent the rest of the night finding the image of the Trystero post
horn” (86). Though “[w]ith her own eyes she had verified a WASTE
system: seen two WASTE postmen, a WASTE mailbox, WASTE
572 From Modernism to Postmodernism

stamps, WASTE cancellations. And the image of the muted post horn
all but saturating the Bay Area [...] she wanted it all to be fantasy —
some clear result of her several wounds, needs, dark doubles” (98).
Yet Oedipa goes on, “played the voyeur and listener” in bars, on
buses, in the streets. She has strange encounters with odd people:
Jesus Arrabal, who remembers her from Mexico, “an exhausted
busful of Negroes” (89) on the bus, an “uncoordinated boy”,
“[c]atching a TWA flight to Miami” (90), “a child roaming the
night”, “a Negro woman [...] who kept going through rituals of
miscarriage each for a different reason, deliberately as others might
the ritual of birth” (91), “an aging night-watchman, nibbling at a bar
of Ivory Soap, who had trained his virtuoso stomach to accept also
lotions, air-fresheners, fabrics, tobaccos and waxes in a hopeless
attempt to assimilate it all, all the promise, productivity, betrayal,
ulcers, before it was too late”; she meets “even another voyeur, who
hung outside one of the city’s still-lighted windows” (91), and an
“old man huddled, shaking with grief she couldn’t hear” (92), whom
she takes “in her arms, actually held him” (93), and helps him up the
stairs. And, “[d]ecorating each alienation, each species of with-
drawal, as cufflink, decal, aimless doodling, there was somehow
always the posthorn” (91). After many hours of drifting

[s]he busrode and walked on into the lightening morning, giving herself up
to a fatalism rare for her. Where was the Oedipa who’d driven so bravely
up here from San Narciso? That optimistic baby had come on so like the
private eye in any long-ago radio drama, believing all you needed was grit,
resourcefulness, exemption from hidebound cops’ rules, to solve any great
mystery (91).

To her adventures among the odd characters in the


“otherness” of the city she adds another strange experience, when she
comes back to the hotel and finds

the lobby full of deaf-mute delegates in party hats, copied in crepe paper
after the fur Chinese communist jobs made popular during the Korean
conflict. [...] They swept her on into the ballroom, where she was seized
about the waist by a handsome young man in a Harris tweed coat and
waltzed round and round, through the rustling, shuffling hush, under a
great unlit chandelier. Each couple on the floor danced whatever was in
the fellow’s head: tango, two-step, bossa nova, slop (97).
Character 573

The failure of action and drifting shifts the balance to


reflection and the attempt to evaluate her experience. “Having begun
to feel reluctant about following up anything” (124) because
autonomous actions could no longer be distinguished from outer-
directed events, because actions had in fact become alienated events
while events could not be turned into or connected with self-
responsible actions, Oedipa considers the possibility that she is
paranoid. Reflection, like action, takes on the form of the labyrinth
without exit, a favorite spatial configuration for Pynchon and
postmodern literature in general. She finally faces the void:

Either way, they’ll call it paranoia. They. Either you have stumbled
indeed, without the aid of LSD or other indole alkaloids, onto a secret
richness and concealed density of dream; [...] onto a network by which X
number of Americans are truly communicating whilst reserving their lies,
recitations of routine, arid betrayals of spiritual poverty, for the official
government delivery system; maybe even onto a real alternative to the
exitlessness, to the absence of surprise to life, that harrows the head of
everybody American you know, and you too, sweetie. Or you are
hallucinating it. Or a plot has been mounted against you, so expensive and
elaborate, involving items like the forging of stamps and ancient books,
constant surveillance of your movements, planting of post horn images all
over San Francisco, bribing of librarians, hiring of professional actors and
Pierce Inverarity only knows what-all besides, all financed out of the
estate in a way either too secret or too involved for your non-legal mind to
know about even though you are co-executor, so labyrinthine that it must
have meaning beyond just a practical joke. Or you are fantasying some
such plot, in which case you are a nut, Oedipa, out of your skull. Those,
now that she was looking at them, she saw to be the alternatives. Those
symmetrical four. She didn’t like any of them, but hoped she was mentally
ill; that that’s all it was. That night she sat for hours, too numb even to
drink, teaching herself to breathe in a vacuum. For this, oh God, was the
void. There was nobody who could help her. Nobody in the world. They
were all on something, mad, possible enemies, dead (128).

The reflection on her state of mind is “closed” and “open” at


the same time, “open” in the fictionality and uncertainty of the
alternatives, “closed” in the iron, dualistic “Either-or” structure of the
argument. This is a typical mixture of modern and postmodern argu-
mentative styles that cancel each other out and lead to informational
entropy, just as action and drifting cancel each other out and lead to
entropy of action. Reflection, deprived of a satisfying result and
bound up in mere possibilities, ends in extreme emotion that includes
the danger of madness, which again is a state of entropy. And the
574 From Modernism to Postmodernism

attempt to avoid madness again then turns to (passive) action, in this


case her attending the stamp auction, waiting for the crying of lot 49,
the Tristero stamps, and hoping to get a final clue by identifying the
bidder, whose presence is expected. She is circling in a space of
uncertainty that does not hold much promise for an escape from
entropy. The book is not only a prime example of the postmodern
handling of the action story but also of the confrontation of entropy
with investigative action/reflection and their failure at negentropy,
the negation of entropy. In other words, what we have here is the
refutation by situationalism of the detective novel’s identity-quest-
formula of progress towards knowledge. The character, who in the
modernist novel is the center of interest, is here ultimately only the
means for a more general purpose, namely defamiliarization and
confusion, enacted by the fantastication of mind and world. Oedipa
stands between too much patterning and too little patterning, which
are both marks of entropy and are here mediated by her drifting.

7.14.4. “Just Doing” Against “What Is Worth Doing?” Business


Against Art: William Gaddis, JR

Gaddis’s JR is a satire on the American value of “Just doing”


and the unshakable belief in business and its path towards success
and happiness. But it is at the same time a transnational novel that
discusses fundamental aspects of human life and their interrelation.
Like Coover’s The Public Burning, JR is a voluminous, fantasized
novel, a maximalist, or “putter-inner” book in contrast to a “leaver-
outer” one, to use once again Thomas Wolfe’s terms. But this long
novel is paradoxically also a situationalist novel without center,
without a manifest sequence of beginning, middle and end. The
dialectic of order and chaos forms a continuous pattern without
synthesis. This pattern is established through oppositions of activities
and values like business-morality, business-art, and money-
spirituality. The definition of values proceeds via the ideology of
“doing”. On the one hand, there is the indiscriminate call for
energetic and active participation in the transactions within the
system of business (“just doing”), and, on the other, this notion of
“just doing” is challenged by asking the question, “what is worth
doing?” (my emphasis), which subverts the maxim of doing. To
illustrate this contrast, the text fragments the action story. “Doing”
Character 575

here neither has nor needs a reflexive preparatory phase, and the
reflexive evaluative phase after the fact is weak and full of confusion,
contradiction, inefficiency. An irony of form lies in the fact that
despite this “ethics” of doing, the novel is filled with talking, is
almost exclusively constructed as the montage of (fragmented)
dialogues.
Business is here an unordered cluster of ego forces, greed,
exploitation, oppression, drive for power, without any checks and
balances beyond the reified codifications and forms of doing
business. The protagonist of Gaddis’ novel, an eleven year-old boy
called JR (for “Junior”) is more like an intersection of forces than an
individual, yet he is successful because he is also a master in
handling the instruments of the system and its forms of doing
business; he is thus the interface of its codifications—and he is
finally the parody of the system, as well. He shrewdly plays the
capitalist system by its own rules, by speculation, by buying and
selling at the right time in order to maximize the profit. With his
business ingenuity, and helped by lucky coincidences, JR establishes
a huge nationwide conglomerate, his “family of companies” (the
term “family” in fact pointing out the incongruity between sentiment
and actual business practices). Doing business involves a great
amount of action and cleverness in choosing the right action, but only
a minimum of reflection about effects and goals beyond money and
success. JR is a “telephone novel” (Lewicki 106) since the
protagonist has to hide his age and therefore can operate only by
telephone. He has an uptown business office in an apartment on 96th
street; his business representative living in the apartment is the
artist/composer Edward Bast. The apartment symbolizes the final
state of entropy, the exhaustion of the System, the transformation of
order into chaos. Speaking of both the chaotic “uptown office” of the
JR Corporation on 96th street, and the runaway situation of the
(business) world in general, Gibbs, the failed writer, says: “Problem
Bast there’s too God damned much leakage around here, can’t
compose anything with all this energy spilling you’ve got entropy
going everywhere. Radio leaking under there hot water pouring out
so God damned much entropy going on” (287). Under these
circumstances, again in Gibbs’ words, “[o]rder is simply a thin,
perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos”
(20).
576 From Modernism to Postmodernism

JR is a novel almost exclusively in the form of (fragmented)


dialogues, a montage of verbal exchanges heard in offices,
conferences, on telephones, even in toilets. The book contains
approximately 180 telephone conversations or telephone monologues
(to use the telephone for doing business, JR has only to let his child’s
voice sound deeper and older via a cassette recorder, played more
slowly). The reified ritual of communication, however, produces in
the business world only fragments, noise, or waste by a “God
damned complex of messages” (403). According to Gaddis, the novel
is “a commentary on this free enterprise system running out of
control” (Abadi-Nágy 60). Running out of control means that the
self-propelling system finally collapses in the waste, the chaos it
produces, becomes entropic. The crash of JR’s “Paper Empire” (651)
is representative of what happens or will happen to the system as a
whole. The collapse results from the lack of reference to reality, the
self-referential abstractedness of the games of speculation, and
manipulation. Excess in codifying the games of business leads to a
“‘decodification’ of all codes” (Durand 1980, 49). The novel reflects
this state of affairs by being itself a kind of “runaway
system”(LeClair 1981, 592),139 without division into chapters, without
quotation marks or clear demarcation of speakers, without a guiding
principle like plot or character. For the traditional forms (the linear
principles of suspense, causality, and logical sequence), the reigning
compositional method substitutes the rules of “spatiality”, simul-
taneity, and equality of all signifiers and signifieds. They create their
own chaotic force, which paradoxically produces the end of all force
and form, entropy. Correspondingly, the aesthetic program is
complemented with an unaesthetic one. The excess of linguistic
signs, their deficiency of structure, the lack of a hierarchy of values
approach the status of noninformation, nonunderstandability that
comprises the whole invented world.
Entropy and the void are close relatives; both are adverse to a
balance of order and disorder. Entropy signifies chaos, the void
nothingness. The system is defined by entropy or the approach of
entropy. The character or the reader experiences the abyss, the void.
Business activity in excess fills the world and covers the void. By
expanding to the exclusion of everything else, business activities and
its values of “just doing” here do not only foster entropy; they also
produce a human vacuum, the void. The teacher Amy Joubert, a kind
Character 577

of moral authority in the book, realizes that JR’s energy, his thirst for
action, for “just doing”, responds to “something quite desolate, like a
hunger” (247), the hunger for something that is worth doing. JR’s
failure to see anything but money and success-values is also a failure
of the system that does not give access to any other, artistic, spiritual
or religious values and activities, or at least denies them social
relevance (Cates to Beaton: “Not talking about any damn ethics
Beaton talking about the price of the damn stock” [435]). As the
businessman Moncrieff tells JR’s school class: “Well I’d just say
boys and girls, as long as you’re in the game you may as well play to
win” (107). Cates instructs his lawyers in the way business is done:
“I’m telling you what I’m doing and you find how to do it that’s all”
(470). Beaton says about the word “charity”: “Yes well I use it in its
tax law connotation” (212). When Edward Bast raises objections
against JR’s plans, JR’s stereotypical answer is the clichéd idea of
doing: “No but holy shit Bast I didn’t invent it I mean this is what
you do!” (466) JR has fully understood the rules of the system and its
doings; they are simply rules for doing, without ethical relevance:
“These laws are these laws why should we want to do something
illegal if some law lets us do it anyway [...]. I mean these are these
laws which you’re supposed to find out exactly the letter of them and
that’s what we do exactly the letter!” (470-71) These laws, for
instance, allow JR’s business firm Ray-X, which makes toys, to
supply a rebellious African tribe with plastic arms, the result being
that it is massacred by government troops. When one of his business
operations is praised by the press as a “shrewd move by downstate
financial interest”, JR asks: “I mean shrewd financial interests what
are they trying to say we screwed them?” (293) Since he has no core
of his own and is in fact the mere instrument of business procedures,
of empty forms and forces (greed for money, power), and the
intersection of public discourses (in hiding), he has no way of self-
definition and needs, and is delighted to be defined by the press as a
person of vision and action, of “just doing”.
The counter-position to business practices and their moral of
“just doing” is the attitude of the artist who asks, “what is worth
doing?” There are a number of artists in the book, the writer Jack
Gibbs, who plans to write “a book about order and disorder more of a
sort of a social history of mechanization and the arts, the destructive
element” (244), but cannot do it; or Thomas Eigen, who, in Gibbs’
578 From Modernism to Postmodernism

words, “finally found everything around him getting so God damned


real he couldn’t see straight long enough to write a sentence” (492),
or Schramm, who commits suicide because, as Gibbs says:

Christ look can’t you see it wasn’t any of that! it was, it was worse than
that? It was whether what he was trying to do was worth doing even if he
couldn’t do it? whether anything was worth writing even if he couldn’t
write it? Hopping around with that God damned limp trying to turn it all
into something more than one more stupid tank battle one more stupid God
damned general, trying to redeem the whole God damned thing by (621).

The most important artist figure is Edward Bast, who is a


character at the crossroads, an artist who believes in “[t]he height of
the artist’s claim” (255), and at the same time acts as the business
representative of JR’s “Family of Corporations”. He has moral and
artistic problems. His problem as a moral person who considers
integrative morality as the basis of identity (a nostalgic idea) is the
division of morals (of which Max Weber spoke), namely that the
economic/social system has developed a code of its own, oriented
towards success and money values, and that this business mentality
has nothing in common with Christian morals or the biddings of a
personal conscience. There is no unified and unifying ethical code of
behavior. Separating the spheres of human activity and their values,
JR tells Bast, “I mean this isn’t any popularity contest hey” (296).
Besides the opposition business-morality there is the other one,
money-spirituality. Here the relation between the two poles is
different. While business and morality are rigidly separated, though
they should be interconnected, spirituality and art are fused with
business, though they should be separate. The fact that business and
art are not separate but closely allied frustrates Bast in his role as an
artist. For the defeat of his highflying expectations he makes
responsible JR and his kind: “you can’t get up to their [the artists’]
level so you drag them down to yours if there’s any way to ruin
something, to degrade it to cheapen it” (659).
But art is criticized too, here as in Coover’s The Public
Burning, and in many other postmodern narratives, for instance in
Barthelme’s texts. Bast indulges in the cliché of the romantic artist
without living up to the high claim that comes with it, at least not in
his work in progress which does not show the invigorating force of
art, the saving energy of human redemption, and never gets finished.
Character 579

He is placed in the middle of a number of contradictions whose


interface he is. As the leading business representative of a large
Corporation, he does not pay any attention to the money to which he
is entitled, but then he takes on additional jobs as artist that mock his
claim to artistic autonomy. Furthermore, though he claims to be an
artist and acts like one, he cannot meaningfully define the position of
the artist in clearly aesthetic terms that alone could open up an
autonomous space for him, could give the force art a dignified place
of its own in the world. He falls back on a vague, personal necessity-
of-“doing” argument that just repeats weakly an exhausted modernist
cliché and is in fact parodied by paralleling the “just-doing”
philosophy of business. Only when Bast is told in the hospital by a
dying stranger: “You don’t even know what failure is at your age
how can you call yourself one when you’ve never done anything”
(672), is he finally ready to give up his stultifying obsession and to
realize that the exaggerated claim he made only leads to empty
pretension and excludes the freedom of choice:

I was thinking there’s so much that’s not worth doing suddenly I thought
maybe I’ll never do anything. That’s what scared me I always thought I’d
be, this music I always thought I had to write music all of a sudden I
thought what if I don’t, maybe I don’t have to I’d never thought of that
maybe I don’t! (687)

In this final turn, “doing” and “not doing” balance each other.
Nothing is worth doing when it results from an obsession, either with
business or with art. On the other hand, doing can be made worth
doing by making it so. Important as a guide-line is: “doing what’s
there to be done as though it’s worth doing” (687); the “as though”
phrase compares with the “as if” formula in Barth’s “Anonymiad”,
though the contexts are different. Bast throws his notes into the
waste-basket, but takes them back out “[b]ecause it’s all I’ve got!”
(718) Yet his spirit is changed; now it is less pretentious, more
modest in its claim, without demand of perfection, a guarantee of
meaning. Again it is doing, not thinking, that is the clue. The value of
doing is split. Doing finally has a good “organic” and a bad
“mechanic” meaning.
580 From Modernism to Postmodernism

7.14.5. Voodoo-Aesthetics, and Action as Life Force: Ishmael


Reed, Mumbo Jumbo

Among the most important aspects of postmodern fiction and


its view of America are, as illustrated in the cases discussed above,
the antitheses action-entropy and action-thought. Ishmael Reed, an
African- American writer, chooses action over thought. He practices
what he calls Neo-HooDoo art as a challenge to authority, to dead
Western history and death-like Western cultural values, which end in
entropy. Against (white) society and history, their traditions and
value systems is set Life as the alternative value. Since life is
exuberance and excess, Reed’s art is an art of fantastic excess, an
excess of action, events, and activity in general. Tony Tanner,
referring to Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy, another book of excess, makes a
telling remark as to the purpose of excess in postmodern fiction. The
(excessive) “length of his book is the tenure of his [the author’s]
freedom” (1971, 248).
In Reed’s book it is the excess of nature that frees the human
being from (Western) civilizational bondage. This is unusual in the
postmodern novel. Yet the attitude is different with African-
American and Native American fiction (see, for instance, N. Scott
Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, Leslie Silko’s Ceremony).
Actually, Reed’s novel Mumbo Jumbo gains its viewpoint from the
confrontation of mind and body, consciousness and unconsciousness,
regulation and liberation, power and resistance, thought and action,
form and force. Action is split in its meaning. Action as affirmation
of life (and resistance against authority) is indissolubly connected
with creativity and anarchy, with expression, i.e., expression of the
life force, as it manifests itself in dance and music, particularly black
music like ragtime, jazz, blues, i.e., in the joy of living. Action as
affirmation is set against action as violence and repression,
perpetrated by the System and its institutions. In a reversal of the
action story of Western “civilization”, action in the liberating sense
here has no story and is indeed the liberation from the allegedly
sterile, manœuvering, and controlling civilizational story of action as
improvement; it is the deliverance from reflection, motivation,
manipulation, stereotyped evaluation according to Western tradition
and its prejudices; it is the spontaneous eruption of life’s energies.
Action in this liberating sense of force is not part of a logical chain: it
Character 581

is “situational”. Its values and frames of reference replace society


and culture, discipline, and thought with life and energy, with
happiness in being and uninhibited expression of emotion. Reed’s
novels — in contrast to other postmodern writers — do not dissolve
the duality of existence but emphasize it, though they demand in a
kind of utopian spirit the unity of the social and the natural spheres,
at least as the goal of thinking and acting. Reed uses the postmodern
strategies of fantastication and comicalization to alleviate the
constructed oppositions without displacing them. He places them in a
specific historic time and within his version of the history of
civilization from the ancient Egypt of Osiris to the Harlem
Renaissance.
Reed chooses the time from 1915-23, especially the Harding
years. The thematic frame is the rise and expansion of the so-called
“Jes Grew” conspiracy from New Orleans across the United States to
New York. It is a fantasized black or black-power movement
subversive of the white mainstream establishment and is connected
with ragtime, jazz and blues. People in power experience the
movement as a terrifying event, a “thing” that makes people into
“cases”. Already on the first pages, the System’s functionaries in
New York describe the symptoms of being stricken by this event as
being seized by the need to act, to feel, to perceive, to hear, and to
speak. The symptoms of “Jes Grew”, “once dormant, [...] now a
Creeping Thing” (5), are that “people were doing ‘stupid sensual
things,’ were in a state of ‘uncontrollable frenzy,’ were wriggling
like fish, doing something called the ‘Eagle Rock’ and the ‘Sassy
Bump’; were cutting a mean ‘Mooche,’ and ‘lusting after relevance’”
(6). Having no form of its own, this invigorating force, this “mumbo
jumbo”, is a “case occurring in 1 neighborhood and picking up in
another. It began to leapfrog all about us”. This “Jes Grew” is a
“psychic epidemic”, it is “nothing we can bring into focus or
categorize; once we call it 1 thing it forms into something else” (7).
While for the adherents of the System Jes Grew is a terrifying event,
it is for the stricken “patient” a primordial feeling: “He said he felt
like the gut heart and lungs of Africa’s interior. He said he felt like
the Kongo: ‘Land of the Panther!’ He said he felt like ‘deserting his
master,’ as the Kongo is ‘prone to do.’ He said he felt he could dance
on a dime” (8). Asked what he hears, he lists “shank bones, jew’s
harps, bagpipes, flutes, conch horns, drums, banjos, kazoos”. In his
582 From Modernism to Postmodernism

utterances, “[h]e started to speak in tongues” (8). The conclusion


leaves no doubt: “There are no isolated cases in this thing. It knows
no class no race no consciousness. It is self-propagating and you can
never tell when it will hit”. Indeed, “6 of them [JG cases] are some of
the most distinguished bacteriologists epidemiologists and chemists
from the University” (8). Even the “Mayor feels that uncomfortable
sensation at the nape and soon he is doing something resembling the
symptoms of Jes Grew, and the Doctor who rushes to his aid starts
slipping dipping gliding on out of doors and into the streets”. Yet
the “Jes Grew epidemic was unlike physical plagues. [...] Jes Grew
enlivened the host. [...] Jes Grew is electric as life and is
characterized by ebullience and ecstasy. [...] Jes Grew is the delight
of the gods” (8-9). The conflict in the country is between “2,000
years of probing classifying attempting to make an ‘orderly’ world”
(175) and that which has been suppressed in the process, life. And
“Jes Grew is life. [...] They will try to depress Jes Grew but it will
only spring back and prosper” (233). Yet Jes Grew as life-force
needs a human form, and form is given it by a text, a “Book of
Litanies”, written in the mythic times of Isis and Osiris.
This “Book of Litanies” is the object of both plot and
counterplot. As mentioned, the action-concept is split. There are
repressive actions of the authorities that are directed against the Jes
Grew-“infected” victims and are experienced by them as stifling
events. The repressive actions result in three murders and uncounted
cases of interference, violence, and obstruction. But action calls up
reaction, and power is answered with resistance. Both power and
resistance work openly and secretly, as conspiracy and counter-
conspiracy. Reed’s novel employs the detective formula, which suits
Reed perfectly, since “[b]eing a Negro in this society means reading
motives in a complicated way” (Shr 13). On the one hand, “Jes Grew
is seeking its words. Its text. For what good is a liturgy without a
text?” (9) On the other, this historic Text is sought by those who wish
to destroy it in order to weaken the “plague”. The history of The
Book, which is important because it gives the Jes Grew movement —
apart from the activities of the present — a universal perspective, a
historical viewpoint, and a textual form, is traced through the
repetitive, cyclical movements of rigid patterning and pattern-
breaking in history from Egypt via Christianity to the present. After a
time characterized by the liberating spirit of affirmation and joy, of
Character 583

dancing, singing, and respecting the mysteries of life in the spirit of


Osiris and Isis, follows a time in which Set, the brother and enemy of
Osiris, “the deity of the modern clerk, always tabulating” (185), and
his followers, the Atonists, make every effort to repress the freedom
of life in favor of form, of categorization, regulation, and goal-
directed striving, against which the people then rebel in the spirit of
Force and of Life. Art is not the expression of social order and is not
subject to regulating aesthetic standards but is, as force, the
subversion of them, the refusal to accept their authority.
Concomitantly, The Book, written down in antique times by the artist
Thoth, contains the record of the choreography of Osiris’ dances; it is
called “A Book of Litanies”, the “Book of Thoth”, or just “The
Work”, and is intended “to feed the spirits that were seizing the
people” (187), to teach people “the Osirian Art” (192), “to permit
nature to speak and dance” (188): as form it serves to avoid
outbreaks of harmful disorder that could give a pretext for repressive
measures by the Atonists, especially the Atonist Christian Church.
On labyrinthine paths the Sacred Book has come to New
York. It is in the possession of Hinckle Von Vampton, the librarian
of the order of the Knights Templar, founded in 1118, who has
discovered it in a secret passageway of its headquarters, the Temple
of Solomon. Hinckle, having found a way to evade death, is now in
New York. Afraid of the Book’s power to raise Jes Grew movements
wherever it is placed and also to evade detection, “[h]e selected 14
J.G.C.s and paid them a monthly salary just to send the Text around
to each other in a chain, each time changing the covering so that the
authorities wouldn’t get suspicious” (217). Using the fear of those
who know the Book’s magic power to raise the rebellious force of
Jes Grew, Hinckle forces “[t ]he Wallflower Order, a secret society
of enforcers, established when the Atonists triumphed in the West”,
to destroy the evidence that led to the trial of the Templars in 1307
and the disbanding of their order. “He made a deal with them to the
effect that his Order would have to be in charge of the Crusade
against Jes Grew in order for him to return the Book”. At the end
the Book is in the possession of Abdul Hamid, the voice of the New
Negro, to whom, for no clear reason, “1 of the 14 people on the list
[of Hinckle’s circulators of “The Work”] [...] gave the book” (217),
and who is killed because his murderers think he has it. The irony is
that he has destroyed the Sacred Book, the reason being, as he says in
584 From Modernism to Postmodernism

a letter written before his death to Papa LaBas, a magician, an


“activist” of the Voodoo rites and a prophet of Jes Grew, that after
translating it “I have decided that black people could never have been
involved in such a lewd, nasty, decadent thing as is depicted here”
(231). With the destruction of the Book, the Jes Grew movement
suddenly recedes, but Papa LaBas knows that Jes Grew is not bound
to a fixed Text, that on the contrary it is pure Force, and as such

has no end and no beginning. It even precedes that little ball that exploded
1000000000s of years ago and led to what we are now. Jes Grew may even
have caused the ball to explode. We will miss it for a while but it will
come back, and when it returns we will see that it never left. You see, life
will never end [...]. They will try to depress Jes Grew but it will only
spring back and prosper. We will make our own future Text. A future
generation of young artists will accomplish this (233).

The fantastication of the world and the satiric, grotesque, and


comic perspectives here combine to indict and to ridicule the
Western belief in systematization and rigid patterning, in the tradition
of fixed values. Though Reed despises the patternings of the Atonist
Freud, he uses the antitheses of consciousness and unconsciousness,
of thought and instinct, of planning and spontaneity, to build up the
dichotomies of Civilization- Life/Nature, Form-Force that
characterize the human being individually and universally, and that
determine human history and the relationship between the
mainstream and the minorities/ethnic groups. However, the
playfulness of Reed’s approach bestows on his novels, in addition to
their satirical aggressiveness, an overall sense of liberation. Excess in
the games of the imagination is a special product of voodooism; it
opens up a way out of the stifling atmosphere of social anonymity
and imprisonment, but also out of the either-or paradigm of social
criticism into the playful plurisignification of postmodern fiction.
The possible is the realm of the imagination, which is
conceptualized in the history of ideas in different ways, depending on
the thought system of which it is part. The imagination is central for
romantic, modern, and postmodern art, but in quite divergent ways. It
seems pertinent that we complete our study after the analysis of the
various separate aspects of postmodern narrative with a synthesizing
view of New Fiction, returning to the overview of the beginning
chapters, now however, under different aspects. Nothing can serve
our purpose of summing up the central aspects of postmodern fiction
Character 585

better than an examination of the conception, the structure, and the


function of the imagination in postmodern times. We will dedicate
the next chapter to this task. This is followed by an overview of the
perspectives of incongruity and negation that we mentioned at the
beginning and had referred to many times: satire, the grotesque, play,
parody, irony, and the comic mode. Here we will define them
systematically and set them in relation to one another, though a more
detailed study has to wait for another book, which is in progress.
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8. The Imagination

8.1. The Imagination and the Imaginary

The driving force behind the creation of aesthetic worlds is


the imagination. Because of its many conceptualizations or, more
precisely, because of the “three basic paradigms that permeate its
history”, namely “foundational discourse”, “combining activity”, and
“independent faculty”, imagination has always been a vague and
difficult phenomenon. Its indefinability does not spring “solely from
the inadequacy of discourse” but rather from the fact that the
imagination “has no identity of its own; as itself it appears to be
indeterminate” (Iser 1993, 180-81). Serving historical needs by
uncovering or at least marking the ungraspable, the imagination is in
fact dynamic and transformative, crosses the threshold of partitions,
fills the space left vacant by perception and reason, includes emotion
and desire; according to Kohler in The Tunnel, “the imagination [is]
guided by feeling, fueled by desire” (591). It composes the immanent
and transcendent, the familiar and the unfamiliar, past, present, and
future, giving wide range to the virtual compared to the actual.140
“Hume and Kant regarded this faculty as something mysterious and,
in the final analysis, impenetrable. But when, in late classicism and
early Romanticism, the subject and its self-realization became the all-
important issues, imagination was given such concise definitions that
it appeared to be knowable; and it advanced to the head of the faculty
hierarchy” (Iser 1993, 181-82).141
The idea of the primacy of an autonomous imagination has
been rejected by the structuralists and poststructuralists, together
with the notion of an imagining subject as a transcendental source of
meaning, as advocated by philosophers like Kant, Schelling, Husserl
and Sartre. Many postmodern theorists “regard imagination as a
mystified and mystifying bourgeois notion, a romantic way of
concealing the real roots of creativity which reach down not into
some dark inner world but into that ideology which it is the radical
critic’s task to demystify” (Washington 163). Deconstruction de-
588 From Modernism to Postmodernism

centers and devalues the concepts of the autonomous imagination.


For Lacan, the imaginary is a narcissistic illusion:

The Imaginary Order includes the field of phantasies and images. It


evolves out of the mirror stage, but extends into the adult subject’s
relationships with others. The prototype of the typical imaginary relationship
is the infant before the mirror, fascinated with his image. Adult narcissistic
relationships [...] are seen as extensions of the infantile situation. The
Imaginary Order also seems to include pre-verbal structures, for example,
the various “primitive” phantasies uncovered by the psychoanalytic
treatment of children, psychotic and perverse patients (1986, 81).

Althusser and others relate Lacan’s concept of the


imagination to ideology in the sense of false consciousness. As an
imaginary assemblage, the imagination is a “structure of
misrecognition” (Althusser 219).142 If, as radical poststructuralist
positions hold, the human being does not speak or write language,
but rather language speaks and writes the deconstructed
transcendental subject, then the concept of original imagination as
the source of meaning loses its foundation in literature, where it is
de-psychologized, made the product of intertextuality. For Roland
Barthes, “[t]he text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the
innumerable centres of culture” (1977, 146); it is the product of
“multiple writings [...] entering into neutral relations of [...] parody”
(148). In a world of simulacra, human consciousness still produces
images, but, Foucault says, referring to Andy Warhol’s seriographs
of consumer items, “the image itself, along with a name it bears, will
lose its identity. Campbell, Campbell, Campbell, Campbell” (1983,
54). Derrida, one of the most rigorous deconstructionists, cannot
accept the imagination as the exclusive generator of creativity.
Instead of the imagination as unifying and meaning-giving origin of
creativity, we have merely the “mirror of a mirror [...] a reference
without a referent, without any first or last unit, a ghost that is the
phantom of no flesh, wandering about without a past, without any
death, birth or presence” (1988a, 206). We have the “image without
model, [...] without verisimilitude, without truth or falsity, a miming
of appearance without concealed reality, without any world behind
it” (211). However one evaluates it, the imagination manifests itself
in different ways, blurring its profile. Since such a multifaceted
potential can be explored only in terms of its aspects, it is scarcely
surprising that the history of imagination, or fantasy, frequently
The Imagination 589

involves irreconcilable discourses, concerned sometimes with its


grounding, sometimes with its status as ars combinatoria (which
creates images of the world, calls up the past in the present, and
wanders off into its own, imaginative worlds), and sometimes with
its status as a faculty (Iser 1993, 171). Because of the problematic
status of the imagination, and because of the mounting skepticism
concerning its “true” nature, another, more “neutral”, descriptive
term has been introduced: the “imaginary”.
For simplicity’s sake we will continue to employ the term
imagination, even in its reduced status. This makes a comparison
with Kant easier and at the same time does justice to the fact that
there are also models of the imagination, which, though they do not
interpret the imagination any longer as innate faculty, use it as an
instrument of postmodern hermeneutics. Richard Kearney, referring
to Ricoeur, writes: “The conclusion of such a radical hermeneutic is
that a post-modern imagination is one which has no choice but to
recognize that it is unfounded [sans fondements]. It no longer seeks
an ontological foundation in itself as transcendental subject, or
outside itself in some timeless substance. But it does not, for all that,
necessarily find itself without purpose. This task always remains: to
interpret the images of the other and to transfigure one’s own image
of the world in response to this interpretation” (1991, 180). This
interpretation always occurs with a “watchful eye for the ruptures
and the breaks and the irregularities in existence” (Caputo 1987, 1).
After the imagination has lost the status of an independent,
integrative faculty, it now has to be defined within an additional
frame of reference.
For Julia Kristeva, for instance, “loss, mourning, absence set
the imaginary act in motion and permanently fuel it as much as they
menace and undermine it”. The “melancholic imagination” is
“reuniting with sorrow and, beyond it, with that impossible love,
never attained, always elsewhere; such are the promises of the void,
of death”. But the “literary (and religious) representation possesses a
real and imaginary efficacy that, concerned more with catharsis than
elaboration, is a therapeutic method utilized in all societies through-
out the ages” (1988, 14, 15, 16). In Soleil noir: dépression et
mélancholie, Kristeva then offers what she calls “l’imaginaire du
pardon”, which is “the transposition of destructive experience into
aesthetic form” (Kearney 1991, 190). Speaking of the “postmodern
590 From Modernism to Postmodernism

challenge”, she says: “Henceforth it is a matter regarding the


‘sickness of suffering’ as a moment in the narrative synthesis which
is capable of importing into its complex whirlpool philosophical
meditations as well as erotic defenses or pleasurable distractions.
Postmodernity is closer to the comédie humaine than to the malaise
abyssal [...] Today the desire for comedy comes to recover —
without ignoring — the scruple of this truth without tragedy, this
melancholy without purgatory” (qtd. in Kearney 1991, 192). In her
view play, together with the comic mode, comes to the fore: “I am
someone else. I cannot say who. There are things that cannot be said,
and I am entitled to play around with them so that I can understand
them better”. For postmodern literature to fulfill its therapeutic
function, it is necessary, according to Kristeva, “to reawaken the
imagination and permit illusions to exist” (1987, 51, 18); and “the
realm of imagination [is] play, and possibility, where even
calculation becomes renewal and creation” (62).
Like Kristeva, Gianni Vattimo pleads for a ludic imagining
that can play with the “demythicization of demythicization [which]
can be considered [as] the true and proper moment of transition from
the modern to the postmodern” (1985, 35). For Lyotard the “narrative
imagination” is the means of resisting the claims of “grand
narratives”, of totalizing ideologies. Again it is narrative play that
constitutes the activity of the imagination, but this play is not
reducible to the mere “dissemination” of signifiers, as with Derrida
and Lacan, or to the artifice of parody. The function of the
imagination is not to attain consensus and unity but disconsensus and
difference. It keeps the space open for the unknowable and
unpresentable: “Let us wage a war on totality [...]; let us activate the
differences and save the honor of the name” (Lyotard 1984c, 82).
This establishes an ethics of imaginary play: difference and justice.
Lyotard compares the discourse of the “narrative imagination” with
Kant’s Third Critique: “You will note that this discourse, if it is
correct, cannot be true as a theory pretends to be: it is no longer a
meta-narrative, even a critical one. It has itself become a work of art,
one where imagination wants itself to be imagination” (qtd. in
Kearney 1991, 200). Most postmodern writers would agree with this
idea.
Summing up the gist of the quoted statements on the
postmodern imagination (or the imaginary), one can note, first, in
The Imagination 591

negative terms, that the imagination now refuses totalizing ideas like
identity and reality, and criticizes (fixed) conventions and ideologies;
second, in positive terms, it affirms possibility, difference, and the
other, the ineffable and the unpresentable as that which the
imagination should suggest and keep open; and, third, play is the
performer of the imagination, but as a kind of free play that includes,
or rather opens up space for the modes of irony, parody, and the
comic mode, all of which deconstruct unities, totalities, and false
beliefs and renew the world in terms of possibility. Federman defines
postmodern fiction, in his phrase “surfiction”, as “that kind of fiction
that challenges the traditions that govern it; the kind of fiction that
constantly renews our faith in man’s imagination and not in man’s
distorted reality — that reveals man’s irrationality rather than man’s
rationality. This I call SUR-FICTION. However, not because it
imitates reality, but because it exposes the fictionality of reality”
(1975, 34). Hawkes remarks: “I’ve insisted that the subject of my
work after The Lime Twig has been the imagination itself”, the
imagination of the narrator being “both creator and destroyer”
(Ziegler and Bigsby 177). For the characterization of the postmodern
imagination, one might adopt Lawrence Alloway’s description of
pop art as a general cultural phenomenon that is directed by
“speculative rather than [...] a contemplative [i.e., modern] esthetics”
(1975, 122).143

8.2. Kant and the Postmodern Imagination: The Beautiful and


the Sublime

The general traits of the postmodern imagination can be


made more specific in a comparison with Kant, a comparison that
illustrates historical changes in the imagination’s function and,
specifically, in its concrete postmodern features, and also reveals the
doubts of the New Fiction writers about its efficacy in achieving its
goal, after it has lost the status of a faculty and its center, the
transcendental subject. Kant was the first to consider the creative role
of the aesthetic imagination worthy of being called a faculty of its
own in a philosophic system, as having an independent, equally
entitled function among the faculties of the mind. Kant’s definition
has influenced all the following definitions of the imagination,
especially the Romantic ones of Schelling, Coleridge, Wordsworth,
592 From Modernism to Postmodernism

Poe, etc. This elevation of imaginative activity, if not the imagination


as faculty, is for the postmodern writers (as for the modernist
authors) the basis for their own arguments. William Gass says of
himself (with certain qualifications) “I’m a Kantian” (Ziegler and
Bigsby 162). Kant sees in the imagination a form principle that has
mediating power. The three dimensions of the imagination are
bridge-builders between sense-data and image, image and the
categories of understanding, and image and reason. In the
Transcendental Deduction, Kant notes:

What is first given to us is appearance. When combined with


consciousness it is called perception. Now since every appearance contains
a manifold, and since different perceptions therefore occur in the mind
separately and singly, a combination of them such as they cannot have in
sense is demanded. There must therefore exist in us an active faculty for
the synthesis of the manifold. To this faculty I give the name Imagination
(qtd. in Warnock 28).

This is the point from which all the other definitions of the
imagination start because whatever the imagination does, its function
is to create a synthesis of the manifold on the various levels of
integration. Kant distinguishes three types or dimensions of the
imagination: (1) the empirical imagination, which provides a
“reproductive synthesis”, and is “entirely subject to empirical laws,
the laws, namely of association” and “falls within the domain not of
transcendental philosophy but of psychology”; (2) the transcendental
imagination which is “productive” and constructive, active and
spontaneous, in short, “determinative and not, like sense, deter-
minable merely”; and (3) the aesthetic imagination, which
“determines sense a priori in respect of its form” (qtd. in Warnock
30).
(1) As the longer quotation shows, the imagination in its first
dimension is the synthetic faculty of consciousness that connects
isolated perception-data, the “appearances” into images, unities in
time and space, and, by giving the manifold its basic imaginative
form, thus “prepares” them for the causal processes of the mind.
Postmodern fiction makes use of the synthetic form-giving ability of
the imagination on the level of the image (in our terms, the situation),
but it uses this ability of construction to introduce force, to
deconstruct and reconstruct the image in non-Kantian terms. There
are three methods of accomplishing this goal. The first strategy is
The Imagination 593

Robbe-Grillet’s: images of the material surface are supplied in


abundance, but they are not prepared for further processing by the
categories of the mind, thus leaving a gap between the image and its
meaning. The reader is left to his or her own guesses when he or she
follows the indeterminate clues placed in the text. The second
method is illustrated by Barthelme’s “picture” stories, like “The
Balloon” or “The Glass Mountain”; they indeed create images as
gestalts and thus prepare the mind-processing of the sense-data, but
the image is a construct that defies the categories of understanding; it
resists being assimilated by the rationalizing processes of
consciousness, which fail in grasping the ungraspable. The third
strategy, again typical of many of Barthelme’s narratives,
deconstructs the image-forming power of the imagination at its basis
by a diagrammatic method. It does not fill the situation with image-
formed sense-data but with discrepancies and juxtapositions of a
factual kind that, because of their unsolvable contradictions, cannot
be processed by the categories of understanding. In all three cases,
negation of synthesis has a double thrust. It turns against the concept
of mimesis on the one hand and, on the other, against rationalization,.
This makes the imaginary product fantastic.
(2) The transcendental imagination is the bridge that con-
nects images with the intellect, makes them accessible to the power
of understanding and its categories of rationalization. In postmodern
fiction, the “good” continuation of apprehension from the image to
the processes of understanding is impeded not only because the
image-forming power of the imagination does not produce coherent
and “probable” images but also because the categories of the mind,
especially causality, have been deconstructed. The rationalizing
processes of consciousness are disturbed, interrupted, dissolved
playfully, comically, full of irony, at any point of the logic chain and
are turned into the opposite of the expected. Transcendental
reflection can lead consciousness into the dead end of antinomies and
paradoxa. Similar things happen to the transcendental imagination.
Its ability to represent an object in the mind without its actually being
present, i.e., its ability to remember, is thwarted. It is no longer able
to recall objects, circumstances, persons, and events of the past,
prepare them for, and connect them with, thought and emotion.
Proust and the modernist stream-of-consciousness novel (Joyce,
Virginia Woolf, Faulkner) base the notion of identity on memory as
594 From Modernism to Postmodernism

permanence in time. The character in postmodern fiction often


surrenders or cancels this kind of psychic time that would establish
subjective, emotional, and reflexive continuity and coherence.
Memory loses the ability to create emotional centers as focal points,
to design an “inner biography” (Brautigan, Barthelme), or it becomes
the instrument for an excessive, often hallucinatory obsession with an
event in the past (Pynchon, V., Gravity’s Rainbow). With the loss of
the ability of memory and emotion to integrate the past, action also
loses its subjective focal point. Since its chain of motivation rests on
the continuity and permanence of the character, the loss of temporal
sequentiality turns action into something contingent, into an event
looked at, so to speak, from outside. Finally, from the viewpoint of
consciousness, the imagination can be seen, as in Beckett’s
“Imagination Dead Imagine”, to include by the processes of radical
irony, paradoxically its own self-destruction or rather the self-
destruction of its manifestations. This self-destruction of the
imaginary unity is meant to prevent being ossified and neutralized by
their being “thematized”, or rather, interpreted by reflection. Thus,
again paradoxically, the self-destruction of its results saves the
imagination as a mobile force. It produces something out of a pre-
actualized nothingness by a continuous process of construction,
deconstruction, and reconstruction, itself remaining, again
paradoxically, a force in a void, “dead”, if you will, in its
manifestations, but not in its dynamics. The relation of the
imagination to transcendental reflection is ambivalent. On the one
hand, the interpretative designs of reflection endanger the openness
of the imaginary constructs by reflection’s tendency of reaching for
closure. On the other hand, the mobility of the thinking-process itself
parallels that of the imagination. Thus tension and mutual support
characterize the relation between the two.
(3) The aesthetic imagination is, of course, a special case.
The latter has a bridge-function, too. In Critique of Judgment Kant
speaks of three faculties of the mind: understanding, reason, and
judgment. “The faculty by which we apply scientific concepts to
nature, is, he says, the understanding; that by which we apply laws to
our experience of freedom, is reason; and between these two lies the
faculty of judgment” (Warnock 43). There is judgment in the general
sense in which the application of the categories of understanding are
also judgments. Judgment in the narrow sense, however, is
The Imagination 595

“reflective judgment”, which does not impose a preformed concept


upon sense-perceptions but becomes active in a situation “where only
a particular is given, and the universal has to be found for it” (qtd. in
Warnock 43). Kant gives examples from the natural sciences and
from aesthetics. The reflexive judgment in the sciences finds pattern
in nature; the aim and result of the aesthetic judgment, which is not
intellectual, is the perception of aesthetic form or pattern in the
appearance of an object, e.g., in the way an object looks. This
perception of form is the aesthetic foundation of symbolic thinking
and of the symbolic method in literature.
Within the category of the aesthetic imagination, Kant
isolates and relates to one another two aesthetic forms, the beautiful
and the sublime. The beautiful is seen as possessed by a finality of
form. Kant speaks here of a “purposiveness without purpose”
(“Zweckhaftigkeit ohne Zweck”), its purpose being not external but
internal to itself. The purposiveness of the beautiful, experienced in
soothing formations of nature and art, is to express a certain form and
thus to display order, and this inner finality of purpose gives
satisfaction and pleasure, albeit a particular kind of pleasure. The
tender social pleasure that is derived from the aesthetic judgment, the
judgment on a satisfying design resting in itself, comes from “the
harmonious interplay of understanding and imagination” (qtd. in
Warnock 47). The fact that an object is conceived as beautiful
contains not only a subjective judgment but also implies a universal,
objective, aesthetic consensus in what Kant calls “taste”. The
universality and objectivity of the aesthetic judgment are based on
the assumption that the faculties of understanding and imagination
have their place in everyone’s mind, thus are universal. A certain
enhancement of the concept of imagination in its aesthetic function
becomes evident, but the parallel to the function of the imagination in
perception is not lost: “Imagination in aesthetic judgment, as an
ordinary perception, has the function of reducing the chaos of
sensation to order. But in the aesthetic contemplation of an object,
the order is, as it were, internal to the image” (Kant 1951, 240). The
imagination in its aesthetic function is still representational in that it
makes one feel the order of the image that is “there”; but it is free
inasmuch as it is “productive, and exerting an activity of its own”.
The imagination in its “free play” (244) is here primary in the sense
that it is free from serving the understanding; rather, “the
596 From Modernism to Postmodernism

understanding is at the service of the imagination”. The concept of


freedom that is here, for the first time, integrated with that of
imagination is the basis for the postmodern notion of imagination
(though, of course, without the Kantian restrictions). So is the idea of
“play”. The idea of “free play” is taken up by Derrida and post-
modern fiction and is made absolute.
With Kant the “free play” of the imagination, however, is not
restricted to revealing comprehensible and limited patterns and
designs in objects that it judges aesthetically beautiful. It can also
free itself from the self-imposed task of finding the rules of design
and pattern in the object and thus of cooperating with the
understanding. It can find pleasure in an object that is not beautiful
“because of its form”. In this case the imagination is “not estimating
the beautiful, but estimating the sublime” (qtd. in Warnock 52). Kant
follows here the distinction of the beautiful and the sublime that was
made in English critical theory of the eighteenth century, especially
by Burke. Kant takes up Burke’s differentiation, though he criticizes
its empirical and psychological definition, as well as its being
centered on the physical subject. By aligning them with the concepts
of the imagination, of understanding and pure reason, Kant gives
beauty and the sublime and the differentiation between the two a far-
reaching status in his philosophical system. He notes: “Natural
beauty [...] brings with it a purposiveness in its form by which the
object seems to be, as it were, pre-adapted to our judgment [...] that
which excites in us [...] the feeling of the sublime may appear, as
regards its form, to violate purpose in respect of the judgment, to be
unsuited to our presentative faculty, and as it were to do violence to
the imagination” (Judgment 1951, 83).
While Edmund Burke speaks of “[t]he passion caused by the
great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most
powerfully” (57), Kant emphasizes that the sublime is located not in
the object but in the beholder’s eye, in the subject’s aesthetic
judgment: “Sublimity [...] does not reside in anything of nature, but
only in our mind, in so far as we can become conscious that we are
superior to nature within, and therefore also to nature without us (so
far as it influences us)” (1951, 104). After the violation of the
imagination in the first stage of the sublime experience, the self in
the second stage mobilizes its own energies, returns to its true self,
and overcomes the threat from nature by reflection: “we willingly
The Imagination 597

call these objects sublime, because they raise the energies of the soul
above their accustomed height and discover in us a faculty of
resistance of a quite different kind, which gives us courage to
measure ourselves against the apparent almightiness of nature” (Kant
1951, 100-101). The sublime “discloses to us a faculty of judging
independently of and a superiority over nature, on which is based a
kind of self-preservation entirely different from that which can be
attacked and brought into danger by external nature. Thus humanity
in our person remains unhumiliated, though the individual might
have to submit to this dominion” (101). Energy and judgment appear
as the two “positive” factors of the sublime, which carry its first
stage over to the second. In the second, contemplative phase of the
sublime, which in Kant’s terms constitutes the “real” sublime, the
belief in reason, buttressed by the belief in God’s reason and good-
ness, comes to the support of the overwhelmed imagination.
Kant stresses the contradictory structure of the sublime. The
delight in the sublime feeling results from its contradictions and its
process-oriented and energizing structure, from what Schiller called
its “magic with which it captures our minds” (200), which makes for
the charm of the sublime. As an aesthetic category, the sublime
encompasses at least four polarities, whose dominant in literature and
art can change: (1) the sensuous vs. the spiritual; (2) feeling vs.
thinking or imagination vs. reason; (3) terror vs. delight; and (4)
humankind vs. God. Depending on the firmness of the belief in God
(and reason), either the safety in God and universal reason (and the
feeling of pleasure/bliss) is emphasized, or the overpowering force of
the imagination and the exposure to the unknown (and the feeling of
terror and human insignificance, i.e., pain) can come to the fore. The
result is a “light” and a “dark” sublime.144 The light sublime causes
terror only in a more latent, subdued state, while the “dark” sublime
brings it out into the open and emphasizes doubt and struggle, as in
the case of Ahab’s refusing the “light”, synthesizing sublime vision
of nature in Melville’s Moby-Dick. The sublime as an attitude and
literary perspective is paradoxical (see Pries 6). It represents
something unrepresentable and therefore attempts the impossible. It
rests on the force of reason for its synthesis, and it needs God as
guarantor of security. The human being can only be certain of God
via the ideas and ideals of pure reason, which, however, it cannot
grasp with the categories of the understanding, but must experience
598 From Modernism to Postmodernism

through the ethical voice within and through the beautiful and
sublime in nature or art. As a boundary experience, the sublime
marks the transition from the loss of energy to the gain of energy,
from pain to pleasure, from self-questioning to self-reliance, from the
finite to the infinite. This double-codedness explains the ambivalence
immanent in the structure of the sublime, its wavering between
disunity and unity, irrationality and rationality, passivity and activity,
criticism and metaphysics, or pain and “negative delight” (Kant).
This conflictual and paradoxical structure makes the sublime a
category of incommensurability, and that is exactly what Lyotard
takes it for, leaving out, however, the traditional metaphysical frame-
work that gave it its elevated status.
One would expect that the concept of the beautiful, because
of its static, closed nature, has only limited relevance for postmodern
writers and critics. But this is not always the case. In postmodern
texts, the beautiful can be various things. It may be (symbolic) form,
it may be the surface hiding the abyss, and it may be a reduction, a
de-vitalization of life. Gass, with his Kantian leanings, makes beauty
the hallmark of all aesthetic experience. He takes seriously, and leads
to the limit, Kant’s idea that beauty lies in the eye of the observer.
Not only can sensory experience and art be beautiful, but also can all
the highest creations of the human mind, including philosophical
systems that are not received as truths but in terms of beauty.
Aesthetics turns into the aesthetic attitude or mode. Gass himself
defined the aesthetic mode: “[y]ou enter these various [philosophical]
systems believing they are beautiful” (Ziegler and Bigsby 166).
“[T]he object of art is to make more beautiful that which is, and [...]
that which is is rarely beautiful, often awkward and ugly and ill-
arranged” (Gass World Within the Word 1979, 105); and he adds in a
discussion with Gardner: “My particular aim is that it [the work] be
loved because it is so beautiful in itself, something that exists simply
to be experienced. So the beauty has to come first” (LeClair and
McCaffery 23). Both statements suggest that the “beautiful” points to
the aesthetic quality of the text, the formal structure of the “finished
product” (31) because that is what Gass is primarily interested in.
The depth-dimension of the beautiful, if it is not reduced to a
decorative mode, involves symbolic significance, and it does so in
Gass’s own texts. Especially Omensetter’s Luck has a highly
symbolic quality in the distribution of its themes and its characters.
The Imagination 599

(The fact that Gass departs from this clear-cut formal structure in The
Tunnel, in spite of the central symbol named in the title, might
explain what critics have called that book’s partial failure [see p. ]).
But it is not only Gass who speaks of the beautiful in
reference to his texts. Hawkes says in a discussion with Barth: “I
want fiction always to situate us in the psychic and literal spot where
life is most difficult, most dangerous, most beautiful” (LeClair and
McCaffery 14-15), the beautiful being obviously, as with Kant and
Gass, a formal category, reminiscent of what he calls “structure”, or
an intricate pattern, in his case of design and debris, which serves, as
with Barth and Gass, as the new criterion of beauty. Hawkes
exemplifies in his texts what he means by “beautiful”, for instance in
the formally balanced, beautiful sex-tableaux in The Blood Oranges,
the symbolic qualities of which we analyzed above. Barth, naming
himself an “orchestrator” (13) and referring to his texts as
“passionately formal” (17), as emblems of fiction-making, could
have used the term “beautiful”. Gass says: “Barth establishes [in
“The Night-Sea Journey”] a beautiful tension between the sperma-
tozoon, which say ‘No’, and the finale, which, like Molly Bloom,
says ‘Yes!’ But, I think, Barth means the no, far more than the yes”
(Ziegler and Bigsby 166). But beauty is also surface, hiding the
abyss. Esme in Gaddis’s The Recognitions writes: “Beauty’s nothing
but beginning of Terror we’re still just able to bear, and why we
adore it so is because it serenely disdains to destroy us” (298).
Barthelme works with the collage of incongruities: “I look for a
particular kind of sentence, perhaps more often the awkward than the
beautiful” (LeClair and McCaffery 34).
The beautiful becomes problematic and is evaluated
negatively when it is not a formal characteristic of the text, as it is
with Gass, but characterizes the world depicted. Wherever in
postmodern fiction beauty, harmony, and peace are suggested by a
quiet surface, they are unfavorably contrasted with the life principles
of force, vitality, movement, and struggle. This is true in Vonnegut’s
Slaughterhouse-Five of the extra-terrestrial alternative world of the
Tralfamadorians, whose devitalized forms of behavior are fantasized
into beautiful but sterile irreality. Similarly, in Brautigan’s In
Watermelon Sugar, the beautiful, as category of social and
psychological behavior and balance, is devitalized and leads to a
dead end by its exclusion of force, of desire and intensive feeling, of
600 From Modernism to Postmodernism

love and pain, a lack of vitality which turns harmony into entropy.
Coover’s Briar Rose is a recasting and transformation of the Sleeping
Beauty story. It makes beauty a decisive motive for the plot, the
“heroic endeavor” of the prince to wake up “this beautiful maiden,
fast asleep, called Briar Rose” with a “transcendental love” (26, 16).
The book plays with the beautiful, its attraction, its build-up of
illusions, and its destructive potential. This includes the prince’s
perception when he is caught in the briars: “Ah, the beautiful: what a
deadly illusion! Yet, still he is drawn to it” (26). What characterizes
and complicates the use of concepts and terms like the beautiful and
the sublime in postmodern fiction is the fact that almost all narrative
arguments and patterns are overlaid with irony, parody, or the comic
mode and thus attain an ambivalence that would be inconsistent with
Kant’s understanding of the terms, or at least complicate their use.
Though the dominance of the force-factor in postmodern narrative
scarcely ever allows the beautiful to manifest itself unmodified, even
undeformed, the multiperspective and the balance of form and force
may establish a symmetry which can be — in Gass’s terms — again
formally beautiful, a beautiful harmony. In addition, in a doubly
aestheticized form that superimposes, for instance, over the “natural”
the “artificial”, as in Hawkes’s sex tableau in The Blood Oranges, the
beautiful attains new significance as the creator of a moment of
revelation, of synthesis, of possibility which, however, does not last.
More important than the idea of the beautiful (for which, in a
sense, modernism has striven in the balance and totality of form) is
the concept of the sublime that, because of its contradictory structure
already emphasized by Kant, has had an astonishing career with
postmodern critics, especially with Lyotard and his eager followers.
They have employed the notion of the sublime to illustrate the
contrarian function of literature and art in a postmodern age of global
information, endless entertainment, and a seemingly “anything goes”
attitude that appears to know no limits of presentation. By way of
contrast to a culture of “depthlessness”, the postmodern sublime is
described as that which “puts forward the unpresentable in
presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms,
the consensus of a taste [...] that which searches for new
presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a
stronger sense of the unpresentable” (Lyotard 1984c, 81). Though
Lyotard explicitly refers to Kant in his definition, what is missing is
The Imagination 601

of course the metaphysical frame of reference, which would make


the experiencing subject safely rest in the certainty of belief. A whole
wave of transferences of Kant’s (metaphysical) sublime to human
civilization has followed. Nevertheless, whatever is experienced in
contemporary culture as sublime only reveals a “human sublime”.145
It is obvious that the centered, unique sublime of the
romantic/ modern tradition, and its “ideology of the sublime”
(Weiskel 6), provided by the representation of landscape and its
infinite space, has been turned into “a moribund aesthetic” (6), and
that the function of art of providing a sublime, blissful experience,
both in the modern sublime moment of “revelation” or “being” (the
character) and the experience of the metaphysics of form (the
reader), has been severely impeded if not abandoned. The
postmodern critic may come to the conclusion that what is left are
only neo-sublimities or even mock-sublimities. These, however,
testify, even if ironically, as is the case with the simulacra of history,
to the human need for a sentiment of wonder and the marvelous, for a
transcendent perspective that “defines the self as interior infinitude”
and affords “the mind an egress from the world of [outer] force, from
the violence of matter”, and opens it to “an intuition of indeterminate
boundlessness [...] though not necessarily to affirm what had been
imagined as ‘God’” (Rob Wilson 61, 200-201).146
This wish to afford “the mind an egress from the world of
force” (in our terms, power and restriction) by means of the
“indeterminate boundlessness” of the imagination is the basis of
postmodern American fiction, its unlimited energy of expansion and
reduction, its ability to fuse opposites, to provide “unity” in
multiplicity , in simultaneity, in the congruity of the incongruous, the
paradox, and in play, irony, and the comic mode. This unity in
multiplicity includes doubt and the paradoxical contradictions that
the sublime exhibits, with or without religious framework. Though
Gass confesses in the interview mentioned: “I’m a Kantian, I’m
afraid” (Ziegler and Bigsby 162), and, elaborating on Kant’s effort, is
ultimately intent on establishing harmony between the categories of
imagination, understanding and the ideas and ideals of reason, he still
cannot exclude doubts about the possibility of success:

Finally, the ground of the imagination in Kant rests upon the very
possibility of order. I agree with Kant, but I’m not so sure it can be done.
So I’m interested in the tension, in the almost successful, possibly failing,
602 From Modernism to Postmodernism

attempt. Is the imagination, in a sense, based upon unification, or is it in a


certain fundamental way disruptive? Is there a real harmony possible or is
there not? (154-55)

Speaking of the sublime in terms of a self-enclosed and self-


referential world of words, Gass remarks: “we [...] float like leaves
on the restful surface of that world of words to come, and there, in
peace, patiently to dream of the sensuous, imagined, and mindful
Sublime” (OBB 58). The synthesis of the sublime is a dream. As
Gass notes — and as the other postmodern writers would agree —
the creative energy arises not so much from the possibility of
syntheses but from the tension between the formal synthesis of
consciousness and the disruptive force of the imagination. (In fact,
this tension that Gass speaks of and utters in the form of questions is
the reason that the question as aesthetic form, starting with Beckett,
becomes so prominent in postmodern fiction.) The postmodern
imagination in its ranging from image-creating to pattern-producing
and void-filling is not so much a productive and connecting link
between the chaos of sense-impressions and the categories of
understanding in Kant’s sense, nor is it a revelator of design and
pattern in the particular object, as in Kant’s aesthetic judgment of the
beautiful, but rather it is the arbitrary producer of constructions and
deconstructions. As such, the activity of the imagination has
something to do, though in quite different framings, with the Kantian
ideas of the infinite and of freedom and of the a priori status of the
imagination that makes it possible to liberate consciousness from the
actual, the fixed, or the ideological.147
The polarity of the imagination, its deconstructive and
reconstructive force, can be seen in a larger context. One problem to
face is that “imagination is phenomenologically self-sufficient but
epistemologically non-self-sufficient” (Casey 172). Another lies in
the fact that the autonomy of the imagination is neither legislative,
moral, nor otherwise, not even self-legislative; its enactments are not
binding, and yet the depiction of human beings and their world in a
kind of totality of possibility includes moral thinking and moral acts,
acts of “legislation” and binding responsibility at least as possibility.
In this lack of authority, in a moral sense, lies the source of the final
paradox of the imaginative activity and its constructs in art and
literature. On the one hand, the work of art and literature has only a
secondary autonomy, while, on the other, it is “the most multi-locular
The Imagination 603

of mental acts” (Casey 182); it in fact touches and imbues the other,
epistemologically or morally directed activities of the mind. But the
autonomy of imagination, which might be described as “imaginative
indifference” (189) is a “thin” autonomy since it is disconnected
from the lifeworld and has no fundamental basis of its own as a
synthesizing faculty of the mind. The activities of the imagination
can easily be put in doubt because, even if they play their “free”
games, they are still connected to this lifeworld. The lifeworld is the
precondition of the imagination’s existence in as much as its
productions are always analogues of the world, though the
imagination is free from the pressing concern of “reality”, which it
nevertheless reflects in its own insubstantiality. The problem is how
to make the purely imaginative construct of art and literature
epistemologically and ethically valuable in its aesthetic self-
certainness and self-determinacy, its epistemological and ethical
indeterminacy and pure possibility, its affirmative autonomy, and its
variability and multiplicity, and thus how to constitute it as a
meaningful analogue of the world. The imagination needs the
stabilizing impulse of rational examination. This need enhances the
role of reflection, which through its structure, and not necessarily
through its results, provides stability.
An enhanced role of reflection, however, also makes for
conflict. Through its image-making, form-giving, and unity-
producing function, the imagination has become all-encompassing; it
tends to absorb the functions of the other powers of the mind like
sensuous representation, (rational) understanding, and reflection by
making them mobile and “nomadic” as well, infusing into their forms
the force of disruption. They all adopt traits of the imaginary and the
fantastic, yet not without strife and struggle. Just as perception and
reflection take on (disruptive) traits of the imagination, the
imagination and its creations are measured, controlled, and
complained about by reflection. Reflection as process, as process of
thinking glides through time and promotes possibility-narration, the
imaginative force of constructing worlds, the modalities of play,
irony, and the comic; however, as self-interrogation, as summary and
resultative thought, it introduces ideas like reality, adequacy,
relevance, or identity-center (see Derrida, Lacan, etc.), terms which
are always “waiting” to appear as correctives, even if they appear
only “under erasure”. As we saw in the discussion of reflection and
604 From Modernism to Postmodernism

its relation to emotion, desire, and belief, the situation that arises out
of these contrasting circumstances is highly ambiguous and contra-
dictory. On the one hand, the imagination takes over the role of the
dominant power and adapts all the other faculties of the mind to its
own workings; on the other hand, however, feeling, desire, belief,
reflection, though they have lost a unifying center, float in and out of
the imaginary’s games in the continuous present, providing irritation
because they cannot be fully integrated into the modality of the
possible and the temporal mode of the present. Their intentionality is
not defined by spontaneity, but by recollection and anticipation.
9. The Perspectives of Negation:
The Satiric, the Grotesque, the Monstrous,
Farce and their Attenuation by Play, Irony, and the
Comic Mode

We will conclude the book with a brief discussion of the


perspectives of incongruity and negation, satire, the grotesque, the
monstrous, farce, and their attenuation by parody, play, irony, and
the comic mode. These modes of fiction need a more extensive
analysis against the background of their own history. There is no
space here for such a comprehensive treatment, which will be
furnished in another book.
Postmodern fiction is a self-reflexive art-form, with a keen
suspicion of the referential function of language, and therefore
without any stable relationship to the external reality or to previously
accepted codes of production. Literary standards and rules are
exposed as the conventional and artificial, frequently clichéd
formulas they are; our normal expectations of temporal and thematic
progression and univocal meaning are suspended and shown up in
their artifice. Self-reflexivity has its own narrative perspectives. Our
study has emphasized the narrative attitudes that correspond to the
self-consciousness of the novel and to the doubts of author, narrator,
or character about the world and their own art. They are the critical
stances that arise out of sheer incongruity and lay bare the deficits of
society in morals, standards, and beliefs, in knowledge and under-
standing. We will here emphasize the postmodern use of these
perspectives of incongruity and deconstruction, and their interaction.
It may suffice to note at this point that all the perspectives
mentioned have a more or less independent status as
conceptualizations of both attitudes and modes of writing. As such
they have the advantage of designating both general human
viewpoints and literary categories. By relating the different stances of
evaluation with one another in a chain of categories, the scheme of
perspectives provides for transitions and overlaps and thus becomes
more flexible. Though the satiric, the grotesque, the parodic, and the
comic modes are understood as models of understanding with
606 From Modernism to Postmodernism

inherent structures of their own, with different profiles of


contradiction and negativity, they all depend on a basis of
incongruity and have a similar dualistic structure. Satire thus aims at
criticism of social deformation from a safe value-point; the grotesque
grows out of satire when no value-horizon any longer fits that which
is being done; it denotes the inexplicable deformation of humans by
humans; farce may render the grotesque “lightly; “the monstrous is
an outgrowth of the grotesque, denotes the ineffable extremity of
evil. The common base makes their interaction possible and
attractive, while the more or less sharp edge provides for variability
and change. The attitudes of play, irony, and the comic mode are
means of attenuating the stricter modes of negation, satire, the
grotesque, and the monstrous. They prepare the ground for a
multiplication and superimposition of attitudes and viewpoints and
the resulting complexities of the postmodern text.
Traditional definitions of satire often lump the comic and the
satiric together into one category, naming as targets of satire the
duality of Folly and Vice: “individual and collective villainy,
cowardice and hypocrisy” (A. Clark 36), “vice and folly” (37),
“hypocrisy, vanity and folly” (Feinberg 38), “folly and vulgarity”
(Kernan 1959, 14), “idiocy and viciousness” (Kernan 1971, 4), “folly
and evil” (Quintana 261), “falsehood” (Sutherland 11). The
combination of folly and vice as target areas tends to subsume the
comic view under the satiric one, as was common after the
Renaissance and up to the eighteenth century, or to subordinate the
satiric to the comic, as nineteenth-century theorists, Meredith and
Bergson for instance, frequently did (Bergson, “Laughter”).
Furthermore, satire may be seen as subservient to humor, the latter
being conceived of as a humanizing and aestheticizing perspective,
which might keep satire from becoming mere invective and give it
aesthetic form; or satire may appear as an intellectual literary form
running counter to the emotionally synthesizing effect of humor,
while maintaining, nevertheless, the ability to include humor by
blunting its own denunciatory edge. Finally, satire may be eliminated
altogether as a literary category, a possibility that Horace had
prophetically suggested and that Hegel in fact had proposed, because
its critical stance allegedly is too aggressively subjective or too
directly related to reality and because its supposedly one-dimensional
didacticism runs counter to the growing complexity of literary forms
The Perspectives of Negation 607

since the Renaissance (Hegel 1975, 516). There is obviously a


demand for definitions that allow each of the mentioned perspectives
its own profile and function. The following modal distinctions do not
start out from genre theories but from attitudes.148
Satire is “a Protean term” (Elliott, “Satire” 1979, 268). It is
one of the oldest concepts of both genre and perspective. Philosophy
and literary theories since Aristotle have described and analyzed
genres, especially tragedy and comedy, and have placed satire (in the
Greek sense of satyr play) as mediator between the two (Horace).
This understanding of satire (satyr) is reflected also in the other,
Roman meaning of satire: a mixed poem not necessarily polemic but
conglomerate in structure. From the genre a typology of “styles” has
been abstracted: tragedy - high style; satire - medium style; comedy -
low style. The genre of satire developed from Greek and Roman
times (in the subgenres of Lucilian and Menippean satire) to the
verse satires, character , and periodical essays of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries in England. Already in Roman times, the quality
of “the satiric” was abstracted from the genre of satire. It indicated a
dominantly polemic and mocking attitude and literary mode that had
a socializing, didactic purpose in the depiction and indictment of
“wrong”, norm-violating behavior. Out of this concept grew the
modern understanding of satire as an “écriture” (Barthes), a mode of
writing that can generate its own genre, as in verse satire, or be
combined with, or superimposed on, other modes of writing, as in
narrative.
Postmodern deconstructive theory has emphasized the
ambivalence of the satiric mode. In this, the analysis of satire reflects
the general challenge of traditional categories since the sixties, the
dismissal of the modern, unifying formal design in art, the doubt in
the referentiality of language and the abandonment of clear-cut
borderlines between reality and fiction, and the substitution for the
concept of author, the notion of intertextuality. Values are seen to be
ideological, either-or opposites are dissolved, the boundaries between
good and bad defused, the “other” respected. Interdisciplinary
cultural studies lead to a multiplicity of viewpoints in the study of
satire, including socioeconomic and anthropological aspects. New
analyses move satire “somewhat away from moral centrality”
(Morton, “Introduction” 2) and emphasize the complexity and
608 From Modernism to Postmodernism

ambiguity of the important satiric texts in the history of literature and


in their historic specificity.
Though one has to take into account the comprehensive
range of satire, it seems advisable to the traditional understanding of
satire as a highly critical and moral stance with a code of value
judgments, a bipolar structure, the contrasting of “Moral Virtue” and
“Vice or Folly”, a definition to which Dryden, Schiller, Schlegel,
Meredith, Bergson and countless others since antique times have
held. It establishes a dialectic frame of reference between deficiency
and value, reality and ideal, criticized and criticizer, optimism and
pessimism. This view is supported by Mary Claire Randolph’s
analysis of formal verse satire (i.e., the form of satire as a genre),
which she sees as characterized by a design that depends on the
straight opposition of extreme vice and extreme virtue, thus
underlining the moral character of satire (“Structural Design”). The
advantage of starting out with such a “full” model of satire is that
variations of, and deviations from, the standard form are more easily
visible and describable.
The comprehensiveness and the transformability of the
satiric perspective guarantee the variability of the poles of both
deformation and value. The target area in the deformation pole, its
kind and range, differ. The criticism may concern specific groups of
misguided individuals, larger segments of society, or society in toto;
it may assign responsibility to the people or to deforming social
circumstances. The kind and rigor of the values set against social
deformations change; they depend on the moral ideal and on the
degree and nature of the disharmony expressed, on the severity of
misdemeanor, the scope of vice and evil. Satirical criticism may be
more or less radical; it may view improvement as probable or not so
probable. The critical voice may accordingly be more or less isolated,
and the criticized person or group of persons may be able to
disregard the criticism or be put on the defensive. In its outcome,
satiric criticism offers two fundamentally different resolutions: either
harmony is (re)established at the end, or it is not. In the latter case, an
abyss of deformation and disorientation breaks open and remains
without synthesis. This radicalizes the perspective of negation and
opens satire for the grotesque. Finally both the deformation and the
value poles may be altered, in fact exchanged. In the dialectic of right
and wrong, the pole of rightness may be occupied either by the
The Perspectives of Negation 609

system with its clear-cut concepts and traditions of what is right and
wrong, or it may be occupied by doubt in the system, the rejection of
its strict forms, its rationality, of its simple cause and effect scheme
and plain ideology, its reified values and stifling closure, against
which are set the forces of vitality and life, the values of openness
and flexibility, the belief in the as-well-as instead of the either-or.
This is the point at which where the fantastic mode, the rambling
variety, the playful spirit, the arbitrary form that the postmodern
theory emphasizes as characteristic features of satire come into their
own and represent the dominance of force over (reified) form. If,
however, force is pure deconstruction without reconstruction in a
new form, for instance as principle of vitalizing energy, this is the
end of the satiric stance which needs a (positive) value pole for its
judgment of the social world. Finally, depending on the topical or
more general nature of satire and its targets, one can speak of
“social” and “cosmic” satire.149 The latter bears witness to the modern
penchant for the universal (truth). Satire and especially the grotesque,
placed at the end of the road of negation, open, as it were, space for a
kind of mystery factor, the wonder and confusion at the power of
human violence, social corruption, and plain evil, given the fact that
the human being by its own claim is rational and bound to a moral
sense. In the postmodern experimental novel, satire hardly ever
stands alone. It is part of a strategy that overlaps perspectives. The
result is a denial of relations of dominance.
Like satire, the grotesque has been widely defined in
mutually exclusive terms. The grotesque has been identified with the
burlesque, i.e., a lower subform of the comic; it is another term for
parody, and becomes the formal component of satire, the latter
creating “grotesque images of society”. The “satiric grotesque”,
contrasted to the “fantastic grotesque” (Kayser), turns into a special
kind of satire. Then the grotesque is identified with the absurd; in the
analysis of Beckett’s texts, the two terms are often used
synonymously. Or the grotesque emancipates itself from both satire
and the absurd as a perspective of radical social deformation and
individual disorientation without binding values. But then again “the
contemporary usage [of the grotesque] is so loose that the word is in
danger of losing all meaning and passing out of critical discourse
altogether” (Harpham xx). What the study of “aesthetic problems and
methodologies” has assigned to the category of the grotesque is “a
610 From Modernism to Postmodernism

dizzying variety of possibilities: the decadent, the baroque, the


metaphysical, the absurd, the surreal, the primitive; irony, satire,
caricature, parody; the Feast of Fools, Carnival, the Dance of Death
— all tributary ideas funneling into a center at once infinitely
accessible and infinitely obscure” (xvii). Such a mix of aspects does
not make for clarity. It characterizes not only the grotesque but also
the other categories of incongruity and negation. Yet though the
awareness of problems of definition may have been heightened by
the postmodern condition of uncertainty, the grotesque, like all other
categories mentioned, still needs a specific profile, if it is to be useful
for the analysis of texts. This is true in spite of the fact that the
grotesque, as a category of extremity, of extreme deformation,
disorientation, and distortion, of violence and paranoia, is more
complex than other categories and therefore subject to wider
variations of meaning. This is why a kind of mystery factor enters
this mode of negation. Since the grotesque is linked to a sense of
inexplicable evil, its definition bears traits of the mysterious, the
ineffable, even the unnamable. Uncertainty of motives, uncalled-for
brutality, and terrifying violence put the grotesque at the limit of
behavior and perception, outside the ordinary. Yet though it
transcends the ordinary, the rationality of motives and common
humanity, it is still measured against them; and since under the terms
of multiperspective it cannot gain dominance alone, qualifications
are called for, and mutations and transitions have to be taken into
account, transfers into other ways of looking at things, into less
extreme perspectives, satire, for instance, or even the comic mode.
The placing of the grotesque within such a chain of interrelated
categories creates relations, and relations interpret the
noninterpretable.
In discussing the modernist and postmodernist grotesque, it
has been helpful to follow Kayser’s line of argument, emphasizing
the negativity of the grotesque. As Harpham remarks, “[w]e should
not contribute to its [the grotesque’s] elusiveness by pretending that
it exists in some positive form. It is [...] a ‘species of confusion’”
(Grotesque xxi). For clarity’s sake we will, however, add a number
of specifications that refer to the potential differences in the focus of
the grotesque perspective. Taking up the features that most critics
attribute to the grotesque, its social focus and its radical negativity,
we will here define the grotesque as a social category and a
The Perspectives of Negation 611

radicalization of the satiric view, a category that points out and


indicts the utter deformation of humans by humans; it is a more
comprehensive or “synthetic” category than the satiric and the
(traditional) comic stances, the incongruencies of which it combines,
absorbs, and revalues. The grotesque is more complex and more
synthetic than satire because it contains two pairs of contradictions,
which again oppose one another and yet are fused in a strange way.
The first (logical) contradiction — that rational human beings are
irrational — is the basis of the ridiculous, of “deformed” and
deforming laughter; the second (ethical) contradiction — that human
beings are inhumane — is the basis of terror and horror. The
grotesque therefore contains both a logical and an ethical
contradiction. It is a totalizing perspective. It radicalizes negation to
the point where neither the belief in the present nor an utopian hope
for the future remain viable. The human being appears as the mere
object of human whim; he or she is distorted and disoriented by the
loss of moral equilibrium and freedom. But by manifesting the ethic
contradiction that humans are inhumane, the text still holds up a
moral viewpoint, and, as Kayser notes, it also nourishes the hope of
every artistic endeavor.
The radicalization of the grotesque can be called the
monstrous. It enters the text, when violence and deformation reflect
“normality”, when no social or metaphysical originator of the
deformation is inferred and no moral view indicated, not even as an
utopian vision. The monstrous is here understood as the
“neutralization” and impassibility of the grotesque deformation of
humans by humans. The monstrous, in contrast to the grotesque, has
no counterpoint and is indifferent to humane values, to care and
compassion, responsibility and distinctions like victim and
victimizer. It marks the quite “other”, the non-categorizable, and
radicalizes the enigmatic aspect that is part of the grotesque and its
inhumaneness. The monstrous just happens as “event” without
sufficient explanation or motivation, logic or reason. It is ex-
perienced as something from outside, as “fate” that leaves no
privileged (moral) position (as the grotesque does) to view and judge
it, it in fact remains outside human reckoning and understanding.
Examples are Kosinski’s The Painted Bird or Hawkes’s The
Cannibal.
612 From Modernism to Postmodernism

Yet the more the grotesque worldview determines fiction and


creates “[c]laustrophobia, violence and crooked sight” (Malin,
Flannery O’Connor 115) as its structure, the more the irrational
powers from within and without assume the roles of character and
action. The more the grotesque becomes exclusive and loses a moral
counterpoint, even the idea of a realizable value, not to speak of an
ideal, the more its irrational aspects come to the fore, the logical, not
only ethical, contradiction in the grotesque — that rational humans
are irrational. The extremity of deformation, distortion, and violence
then tip over and attain traits of the comic, the ridiculous, which are,
as argued above, part of the grotesque anyway. Already
Schopenhauer and Dostoevsky spoke of the distorting human
tendencies in terms of the comic. The latter’s Underground Man
notes: “Man loves to create [...] But why [...] does he also
passionately love destruction and chaos?” He gives an answer that
already points to the interaction of the chaotic/grotesque and the
comic: “He is fond of striving toward achievement, but not so very
fond of achievement itself, and this is, naturally, terribly funny. In
short, man is constructed comically; there is evidently some joke in
all of this” (Dostoevsky 37-38). Thomas Mann sees in the grotesque
a new mode that arises out of the combination of the tragic and
comic: “For I feel that, broadly and essentially, the striking feature of
modern art is that it has ceased to recognize the categories of tragic
and comic, or the dramatic classifications, tragedy and comedy. It
sees life as tragi-comedy, with the result that the grotesque is its most
genuine style” (Past Masters 240-41); he adds on another occasion
that the grotesque was “properly something more than the truth,
something real in the extreme, not something arbitrary, false, absurd,
and contrary to reality” (qtd. in Reed 35), thus emphasizing the
aspect of the “real” that is almost always stressed by the theorists of
the grotesque. The accentuation of the comic aspect will open the
grotesque mode to new ways of operation in postmodern fiction.
The combination of violence and the comic mode is farce. It
comicalizes violence. Violence again is bifocal, at least in the
twentieth century. It can signal the deformation of civil society, or it
may stand for unchecked vitality and dynamism of life. Countering
the reification of human civilization, the theatre of the Absurd and
the theatre of Cruelty (of Arrabal and Artaud) no longer adopt the
humanistic ideals of high thought, responsible behavior, and social
The Perspectives of Negation 613

harmony as standards of evaluation and regeneration, but make the


antagonistic force, Life and life’s energy, their self-evident values.
The targets of indictment are no longer violence and social or
individual deformation, a world standing on its head, but rather
reason, order, and the routine of social life; the lack of balance, the
split of the self, and the determinate disorder and chaos, in short, the
anti-world of absolute incongruity, become the means of
regeneration. This anti-civilizational attitude relieves the individual
of the stifling, overpowering strain of the civilizational machinery,
the pressure of the established institutions, conventions, ceremonies,
official norms, the hierarchies of church, state, and cultural values. In
fact, this kind of grotesque that affirms incoherent energy, exuberant
abundance, and even violence, while it repudiates order and morals,
signifies what Harpham, using Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm theory as a
frame of reference (and accentuating mythic knowledge as an
alternative to rational cognition), calls a paradigm change. Just as
satire finally turns against the mendacity of society and its values,
supporting that which has been so far denied validity, i.e., the body,
unbridled psychic and emotional forces, vitality, energy, and change,
so grotesque violence, rebelling against the moral center of culture, is
meant to destroy the exhausted and clichéd views, conventions, and
values cherished as order by society and in the process becomes
farce. Heller’s Catch 22 is a pertinent example for the blends of the
perspectives of negation.
Play is here the “free play” (Kant, Derrida) of the mind upon
things, conventions, and structures; it dissolves the idea of a
structural unity of the “work” in favor of a process-oriented view of
the “text”, a recognition of a multiplicity, a network of discourses,
which, by playing with and against one another, construct and
deconstruct the text. Play liberates postmodern fiction from
traditional constraints. Yet play is a very elusive and ambiguous term
to define. The spontaneity, naïvety, and creativity of play, its
elementary unquestionableness as well as the mixture of reality and
irreality in it seem to resist analysis. Play is a motion in space, an
occurrence in time, a process of thinking and feeling, and an idea of
the mind. Play has become an important notion in both philosophy
and literature because it contains in itself — as a phenomenon, an
idea, a linguistic term — ambivalence, multi-dimensionality, and
indefiniteness. It refutes the old, in Nietzsche’s view destructive
614 From Modernism to Postmodernism

Western tradition of dualistic thinking by “loosening up” dualities


and their borderlines. The interpretations of play range widely; they
depend on the conceptual framework play is placed in. (1) Play is
seen to be subject-oriented; it is the attitude of the experiencing
subject. For Friedrich Schiller or Johan Huizinga, play integrates the
self. Schiller sees art as the highest form of play, the play of the
imagination as the highest use of human faculties. With the
decenterment of the subject in postmodern fiction, this idea of play
has become obsolete. (2) Nietzsche and Heidegger take play out of
the human-centered context and speak of “world play”. For
Nietzsche, play grants the exuberance of a higher freedom that
affirms life and its multiplicity; it sets the plurality of manifestations
against the reductive Western views that foreground a center, a
metaphysical essence, the order of rationality. (3) Wittgenstein refers
play to language and speaks of language games that can be
multiplied infinitely and that are dependent on the individual.
(4) The postmodern concept frees play from the idea of a
subject. Derrida radicalizes the idea of play into what he calls “free
play”. He views play as a value-neutral, largely self-serving process,
a process of deconstruction and reconstruction. “Free” or “unbound”
play presents itself in Nietzsche’s sense as “the cheerful affirmation
of the game of a world which is determined by a noncenter more that
by a loss of the center” (1976, 441). In free play, contrary to
instrumental play, i.e., play that serves a purpose, the oppositions
subject-object and winner-loser have become meaningless. In terms
of Derrida’s language-theory, play in the text opens “a field of
infinite substitutions only because it is finite, that is to say, because
of being too large, there is something missing from it: a center which
arrests and grounds the play of substitutions” (“Structure”, 118-19).
The play of “différance” inscribes an “infinite deferment of the
signified” (Barthes l977, 158). Free play decenters and is itself
decentered, is no longer, as it was for Schiller, a factor in the
integrating process of the self. This is the precondition for the
activation of play as radical deconstructive/reconstructive energy in
postmodern fiction. The postmodern ambiguous attitude towards the
concept of character in fiction is one of the reasons to regard play,
independent of character and subject, as a self-serving process, as
“text play” (see Iser 1993, 247- 81). This text play has two charac-
teristics: first, it is a mode of creation, of domination over the
The Perspectives of Negation 615

material that is played with, and, second, in spite of its dominance


over the material, play has no structure of its own, except that it is
movement back and forth. Gadamer writes: “In each case what is
intended is the to-and-fro movement that is not tied to any goal that
would bring it to an end [...] it renews itself in constant repetition.
The movement backward and forward is obviously so central to the
definition of play that it makes no difference who or what performs
this movement” (103). But the play of fiction cannot exclude that
which oversteps and transcends it, the existential dimension and the
depth-view beyond the surface of play. Derrida finally emphasizes
that the codes of realism and centrality are such that even when they
are deconstructed by the textual matrix, they still persist, trans-
forming language into a centered world. He notes that the
“irrepressible desire for such a [transcendental] signified” leads to
“the desire to restrict play; this desire is irresistible” (1978, 297). As
a consequence, play with language and worlds does not extinguish
existential anxiety; on the contrary, it creates exactly that which it
appears to overstep, to cover, and to evade: the sense of the void and
of nothingness and the need for a center, a structuring form, in
addition to the play and the game. Play can become self-reflexive
and, as it were, play with play and with the concept of play itself
(Barthelme), to the point of suspending play. The dialectic of play
and void, the force of the back-and-forth movement of play, and the
restrictions of form and center direct almost all of postmodern
fiction, except the most extreme experiments. The flexibility of play
prepares the way for irony and the comic mode.
Irony is a difficult term, too; it includes irony as attitude,
method, and form. It thrives on disengagement, distance, and
relativity; it is a distancing, contemplative, or rather reflexive
attitude, and it is determined by negativity, by the active, derogatory
cognition of disparity. But though irony is certain as to what is being
negated, it is uncertain as to what should take its place. It is a
relational strategy, operating between in-between perceptions,
between meanings that are flux. Behind it there is an attitude of
openness directed towards the deconstruction pole of the new
radicalized possibility-thinking. According to Friedrich Schlegel,
there are two ironies, the irony of subject matter and the irony of
form. While the irony of subject matter is based on the attitude of the
subject, the irony of form is the result of narrative strategies, a
616 From Modernism to Postmodernism

figuration in the text. The New Critics define the modern formal
irony as the resolution of a maximum of tensions, as “complexity”
and “ambiguity” within a totalizing form. The negativity of irony is
“completed”, the opposition of impulses contained by the positivity
of self-reliant and self-confident aesthetic form. In the postmodern
view, the conflict between the two poles — disjunction and unity —
is not solved by the modern strategy of ironic form. Seen from this
perspective, faith in the saving primacy of form takes on the
character of illusion, of evasion and failure. The strain and tenseness
in the modern aesthetic form — i.e., the ironic break of form, and the
unresolvability of paradox — often enough seem to outweigh the
unifying effect. They open consciousness and the text to the
underlying but repressed chaos, to the looming, uncontainable
nothingness.
The recognition of the modernist literary failure to create
stability by aesthetic form and to use form as a shield against the
fluidity and complexity of life has three consequences: first, the
recognition and acceptance of the ironic condition of mankind; and,
second, as a result of this perception, the ironic attitude of the artist,
narrator, character who, as it were, in compensation for all that
perishes become enraptured with the infinity of possibility; and,
third, the balancing out of chaos and order, or even the challenge of
order by disorder that overwhelms order in postmodern fictional
form, which is in fact an irony of discourses. Every position shifts the
ironic ambiguity and complexity from the text’s “spatial” structure to
the elemental, ever-changing movement in time, the ironic flow of
disruptive, unresolved energy and desire, so that one can speak,
instead of an irony of form, of a “free” irony of force, representing in
the text the (radical) irony of attitude. Alan Wilde speaks here of
“suspensive irony” (1981, 10, 127-31). The postmodern ironic
process of endless construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction,
like the modern ironic form, is again double-poled; it has an ironic
structure of its own, because, as both Federman and Sukenick note of
their own texts, the creative process of textual constitution and de-
constitution, especially in the radical cases, of which we will speak
shortly, on the one hand appears to be independent, to control and
direct itself “automatically” in its progress; on the other hand,
however, it makes the subject that abandons itself to the text come to
itself. Contrary to the modern text, it is no longer discernible which is
The Perspectives of Negation 617

the negative and which the positive aspect, force or form. It is a


question of interpretation; each can be both, negative or positive.
Parody ironizes and defuses the finiteness of form, also
moral form, opening borderlines, freeing reified concepts. As tool of
deconstructive force, it negates and transforms the falsifying, reified
stability of form into mobility, while satire negates the content of
unvalues, of vices, of attitudes of immobility. Parody can be defined
with Margaret A. Rose as “the critical refunctioning of performed
literary material with comic effect” (35). One can distinguish, as
several critics have done, according to the target, a specific and a
more general kind of parody. Parody can be specific in that it refers
to one individual or well-known text and ridicules it; or it can be
increasingly general by referring not only to one single text but a
genre or to literary themes, structures, modes of clichéd language. It
is obvious that the more important parody becomes for a literary
epoch, the more general it turns out to be — and the more evident is
its generative power to create something productively new. In fact,
parody has a double dialectic structure. First, there is the opposition
between the target, the dead conventions, and the value pole, the
vitality and energy of the fresh and unspent, used for the devaluation
of the target (in the course of which the relation between the two,
however, can become ambivalent). On this contrast between the old
and the new builds another dialectic. This second dialectic, in its
attack on an exhausted literary mode, builds up the contrast between
the past and the present, the old and the new. On the one hand it
devalues the old and exhausted; on the other, it emphasizes the
ability to reformat old materials and styles for a new beginning.
There is thus a certain latitude for accentuating various aspects of
parody: either imitation and devaluation or stylization, and
transformation can be accentuated, on a scale that allows for an
infinite number of combinations and crossings of dividing lines (see
Brooke-Rose 1985). Postmodern fiction of course emphasizes
stylization and transformation over imitation and devaluation of
narrative conventions; it cherishes the new designs of the text that
parody generates (see Barth 1984). Since the accentuation of
stylization and transformation in parody presupposes that the
procedure becomes transparent, the “clash” between the two
discourses in this kind of regenerating parody is often combined with
self-reflexivity.
618 From Modernism to Postmodernism

The precondition for the easy alliance of satire and parody is


a social process that has worn out not only values but also the
language of values, including the by-now stereotyped artistic
gestures of protest that have become mere rhetoric, part of a self-
serving cultural performance. The language of all criticism, its jargon
of social analysis and judgment, is cast into question. Ultimately
revealed is not only the hypocrisy of the seemingly virtuous language
of criticism, which is allegedly directed against corrupt action and
consciousness in bourgeois society, but also the more fundamental
deficiency: the radical discrepancy between a language available now
only as cliché and a reality neither graspable in terms of values nor
comprehensible and describable in language. When one recognizes
and criticizes the emptiness of the social world and at the same time
is aware of the world-language problem, the sense of language-
being-the-world, satire and parody fuse. Barth, Barthelme, Coover,
Elkin, Gass, Sorrentino, and others parody the stereotyped jargons of
psychology, sociology, aesthetics, cultural criticism, existentialism,
the language of alienation, and the tools of narration, all of which
they consider to be degenerated into ritualized formulas that can be
placed and played with in any context.
The structure of parody is analogous to that of the comic
mode, which in its open form also sets the vital and natural against
the fixed and the mechanical — the difference being, however, that
the comic mode, even if it uses language-effects and targets clichés
of expression, always realizes itself in, and is bound to, the narrated
situation because only the concrete is comprehensible as comic. This
is not necessarily the case for parody. While parody lightens the
earnest “heaviness” of satire by transferring criticism from content to
form, it prepares the ground for the comic mode, which in
postmodern fiction, as we will argue shortly, is generalized to the
extent that it reaches beyond the comic polarity of norm-obedience
and norm-violation. If the comic mode spreads to include the entire
narrative composition, the comic becomes an important stimulus for
parody, just as parody turns out to be an important ally of the comic.
The conviction that there is no difference between reality and fiction,
that all we have is language and its fictitious constructs, leads to the
fusion of the comic and the parodic. The comic mode uses language-
effects and clichés of thought and feeling in a situational
concretization, even “dramatization”, as in Barthelme’s “A Shower
The Perspectives of Negation 619

of Gold”, with its combination of disparities and modes of evaluation


(comic situation and character, parody of existentialist jargon, satiric
view of society and culture), while, on the other hand, the parodic
mode ironizes the clichéd conventions of theory and narrative. The
cliché becomes the meeting ground for the free comic and the free
parodic modes, with the comic mode, because of its narrative nature,
in the lead. Parody performs in postmodern fiction the role of a
mediator between satire and the comic view. Disrupting the
traditional hierarchy of values, it supports the creation of free space
for representing or creating the non-rationalizable, the non-
familiarizable, in short, the “other”.
The postmodern comic mode is different from the traditional
concepts of the comic, which, since Aristotle, have been defined in
terms of the opposition between the individual and society and its
norms; the comic character appears in the traditional mode as a
representative of foolishness in the narrower sense, i.e., of a
relatively harmless, only unreasonable, merely self-damaging, and
correctable phenomenon. The comic mode traditionally has primarily
to do with a logical opposition because the established or new order
is ultimately more rational or natural, and because the individual who
departs from this order only acts unreasonably and not really evilly.
Thus the character who acts foolishly (or the reader) only needs to be
convinced of the irrationality and illogicality of his or her actions.
The author (or narrator) who represents the values of society can
afford to be tolerant and in the end can again incorporate the comic
character into the universally rational or natural order of things. In
the twentieth century, aesthetic theory develops a more expansive
view of the comic perspective. According to Joachim Ritter, the
conventionally important and traditionally valid is no longer
reaffirmed in the comic, but, on the contrary, the small and
unimportant, the unconventional, the despised, and laughable take
their revenge against the hierarchy of values. The comic is in fact
concerned with “establishing the identity of an opponent and outcast
with the outcaster” (“Über das Lachen” 73; see also Plessner 121-
22). Indeed, “what is comic and makes us laugh is what makes the
non-valid visible in what is officially valid and the valid visible in
what is officially non-valid” (Marquard 141). In this “second” kind
of the comic mode, of which Barth, Elkin, Reed, and others furnish
examples, a hierarchy of norms is not established; it is in fact
620 From Modernism to Postmodernism

rejected. Instead, the comic perspective, being made a universal


instrument of interference, demands the expansion of the rational
norms and viewpoints to the inclusion of what is conventionally non-
valid or not so valid. This cancellation of the value differences
between outcast and outcaster, however, still assigns a clear
cognitive and ethic value to the comic mode. The resulting
paradoxical situation is that the leveling or broadening of the norm is
a new norm that is actually not a norm at all. The leveling of
standards and the expansion of the norm in this second view of the
comic mode prepares for a third version of the comic, one that is all-
comprehensive and of greatest importance to postmodern fiction.
In this third phase, aesthetic theory has re-interpreted the
concept of the comic in terms that are no longer of ethical or
cognitive value in a narrower moral or epistemological sense but
rather purely aesthetic and “ontological”. The comic polarity norm-
obedience and norm-violation is ultimately defused by its
formalization or aestheticization. In this purely aesthetic conception
of the comic, the comic conflict is reduced to a “collision of reality
concepts” (Blumenberg 11), or better, the comic is the result, in the
language of communication theory, of the “thematized simultaneity
of differing worlds in the communication situation” (Schmidt 1976,
187). One can view this kind of comic mode with Henrich as “free”
comic perspective (“Freie Komik”). It is free because it
acknowledges no epistemological boundaries, no language formulas,
no social standards, and no narrative traditions. It constitutes
something that has to do with “cross-overs between con-
texts”(Henrich 385) or what Iser calls “flip-overs” (“Kipp-
Phänomen” 1976). The effect of this comic mode (and its linkage
with free play, free suspensive irony, and free parody) is increased in
intensity and force and, associated with that, a stimulation of the
imagination.
According to Rainer Warning, the comic mode (he speaks of
comedy, a term avoided in our context since it indicates a literary
structure, not an attitude) may be taken as the “positivization of
negativity” (“Komik and Komödie als Positivierung von Negati-
vität”), which is here understood, continuing Warning’s argument, as
the unburdening or, rather, the self-distancing from the pressure of
norms, demands, rules, and from domination by satire, the grotesque,
the absurd, the monstrous, the tragic, but also, one might add, from
The Perspectives of Negation 621

the non-commitment of play and the negativity of irony. The free


comic view is positive because it accepts the state of affairs and —
paradoxically — tries to control it at the same time. The comic
perspective both uses (accepts) and deconstructs the traditional
negative (existential) attitudes. It dissolves satire and decenters
Camus’s absurd consciousness, which rebels against the empty
universe, and it transforms threatening entropy into neg-entropy by
an infusion of the force of mind. It is free montage and collage of
independent contexts of pure possibility; the result is the
experimental simultaneity of the non-simultaneous. Even violence
can be transformed and rendered coolly and clinically, without
emotion, as though it were a harmless, non-significant affair. The
comic imagination opens and re-vitalizes the (closed) system of the
merely given and of traditional thought, of oppositions like good-bad
and true-false that in themselves appear to produce entropy.
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10. The Novel After Postmodernism

10.1. Postmodernism and After

— The declining reputation and influence of the theories and


artistic forms of postmodernism in the eighties and nineties of the
last century and the beginning of a new transient era did not signify a
full break with postmodern art and culture, but it did suggest a new
orientation in culture and art following political and social changes.
These adjustments, the longer temporal distance from the high points
of postmodernism, and a certain exhaustion of the postmodern
axioms also changed the critical climate. Critics began to vary their
attitude towards the ideological radicalism of postmodernism, its
deconstructive stance and epistemological skepticism, its attacks on
traditional concepts, values, and customs, and the deconstruction of
centers, forms, and boundaries of thought and feeling. Critics took a
more sober approach, became detached, vaguer in response or
indifferent, distant enough to see the limitations of postmodernism
and make them the target of reconsideration or even aggression. A
process of reevaluation occurred that could take different directions.
Either the term and the concept of postmodernism were more or less
discarded and assigned to a past that appeared to have become self-
defeating and irrelevant in its theories and artistic practices; or the
concept of postmodernism was widened beyond the ideological
strictures in which it was formerly defined. In the latter case there
again emerged two different approaches. Either the list of
postmodern authors in the various fields of the humanities and the
arts was broadened in an attempt to avoid strict limitations (Bertens
and Natoli); or the term “postmodernism” was extended and
strengthened in order to analyze the present as well, so that “the
‘postmodern’ highlights what is singular and original in the
contemporary era”. The contemporary epoch thus becomes the
period of a new postmodernity, a new “postmodern adventure” (2001
Best and Kellner, 2). For the analysis of the post-postmodern novel,
the term “realism” was introduced in order to describe the return to
traditional forms of narrative and storytelling. The phrase “neo-
realism” suggests that the adoption of realist modes of representation
624 From Modernism to Postmodernism

does not mean a return to the belief system of traditional realism (see
Claviez and Moos).
In the following discussion we will take the path of cautious
differentiations. The term "realism" is here used to designate new
developments in post-postmodern fiction, in spite of the fact that this
term and its variations, “neorealism” or “new neorealism”, bring with
them epistemological and aesthetic complications. Since these terms
have been employed all over in the debate about post-postmodern
fiction to describe the counter-model against postmodern narrative, it
does not seem to make sense to thematize the term’s dubious
implications in this short overview. To avoid complications in the
argument we will use the term “realism” but dispense with further
differentiations, and we will employ the phrase “metaphorically” as a
short-cut into the discussion of contemporary narrative, knowing
very well that the “realist” mode of representation in fiction has
never ceased to exist, even in the high time of postmodernism, as a
rival approach to literature, and that the realism or neorealism of the
post-postmodern novel in fact comprises many different realisms,
their characteristics often depending on the way and degree they
incorporate the postmodern strategies of representing uncertainties
and incomprehensibilities. The mixtures of concepts, approaches, and
styles make the post-postmodern changes in fiction appear less
radical and much less clear than suggest the announcement and
celebration of a new realism as the latest stage of literary
development. Doubts have to be raised, when, following the tradition
of celebrating the new as progress in the arts, the "rebirth" of realism
is considered as a new stage of advance in literature, as the revival of
common sense (see Shechner, Rebein). In our argument, we will
leave the more aggressive variants of pro-realism and anti-
postmodernism to one side, and will instead consider the new modes
of representation in fiction as the result of a new concentration on
experience, experience of the world and the self in a wider, social
and cultural sense. Without much theory, one returns to the elemental
source of narrative, which is storytelling, now, however, filtered in
various ways through epistemological and aesthetic insights and
artistic practices of postmodernism.
The decline of postmodern aesthetics obviously came when in
the final stage of postmodernism, innovation deteriorated to an empty
principle that did not create but denied meaning without devising
The Novel After Postmodernism 625

other meaning; when the excessive complexity or complex simplicity


of the text began to overstrain the capacity and the patience of the
recipient with an overcoded, unfocused, self-serving experimentality
that, instead of creating the impulse to decode the text, led many
readers and viewers rather to resistance and boredom. We will later
give two examples. In addition to this exhaustion of the postmodern
axioms, there were of course political, social, and cultural reasons for
the decline as well. One might speculate that the rather stagnant
period of the Cold War, with its putative stability originating from
the attempt on both sides to safeguard the balance of power and the
status quo, left more space for the extreme formal and "irrelevant,"
anti-social, purely aesthetic experiments of the postmodern arts than
had the following period of political upheaval. The fall of the Soviet
Empire and the victory of Capitalism (Fukuyama) changed the
situation. The idea of the end of, or vacation from, history propagated
in the eighties was replaced by a new fall into time, which made it
necessary to find new answers and solutions in politics, and also in
social and cultural studies and the arts. As mentioned, the answer in
art was a new appreciation of social and cultural experience. The new
requirements notwithstanding, the radical postmodern aesthetic
experiments retained a certain influence because, although they had
very limited social functions, their basis — the epistemological,
anthropological and ontological uncertainties of the time — persisted
and left indelible traces on the modes of realism too.
The time since the nineties is here understood as a transitional
era with many uncertainties and simultaneous developments, which
make it difficult, if not impossible, to present a detailed diagnosis as
to its profile, its attributes and its efficacy, let alone name and
categorize it with a classifying judgement. What can be said at the
outset, however, is that the prevailing conditions in the media and
entertainment society both simplified and complicated the situation
of the arts: simplified it by the growing hegemony of culture which
tended to influence and support, to integrate and absorb under its
own terms what was written in fiction; and complicated it by the fact
that under the hegemony of culture, it became more difficult for
literature and the visual arts to strive for that which for modernism
and postmodernism was an undoubted goal and precondition of
serious art, namely its autonomy and its ability to surprise, its
penchant to provoke and break with the old. Since in contrast to
626 From Modernism to Postmodernism

modernism and postmodernism, the post-postmodern reorientation of


the arts mostly happened as a co-evolvement with culture with its
multicultural trends and its market, social and cultural issues played a
greater role than they did before. Ironically enough, the conceptional
elevation of culture to a hegemonial status that reduced the role of
aesthetics in its own terms was heavily influenced by the postmodern
deconstructive turn. Only after the deconstruction of conventional
authorities, of totalizing concepts or seemingly universal verities —
such as religion, nation, society, personality, moral law, progress of
reason, tradition (which have lost their status as ideas of wholeness
and have become collages) — culture would attain a new umbrella
function. It has come to coordinate the social and the aesthetic, the
popular and the elitist, past and present, simplicity and complexity,
sameness and difference, connecting the one to the other, offering for
every phenomenon contexts that take it out of its isolation and
relativize its position, including the (elitist) authoritative position of
the arts. It was only consequential that the novel would remove or at
least reduce the (postmodern) barriers to understanding that impeded
the accessability of the narrative and its cultural message..
Under the hegemony of cultural experience, the link between
the (nervous) optimism of the present and the pessimism of the past
came to establish a pool of potential positional combinations and
relativizations, including the conjunction of affirmation and negation,
in art and literature as well. They led to contradictions in the
intellectual and aesthetic culture between pride in technology and
skepticism about science, between the belief in the dialogue of
cultures and the fear of a war of cultures, between belief in progress
without memory and the cult of memory without trust in the future
— in short, to the contrast between the optimistic sense of a new
departure and the pessimistic feeling of having exhausted the given
constructive and beneficial possibilities of change and moral growth.
If one takes these uncertainties, hopes and fears seriously and carries
them beyond play and ironic subversion, the contrasting viewpoints
allow again the creation of elemental narrative dynamics, the
establishment of contrary poles of moods, sensibilities, characters,
morals, thoughts, and feelings, and thus make it possible, even
necessary, to thematize and dramatize anew the human field of
experience, experience of both the positive and the negative
influences in life (while postmodern literature had neglected, even
The Novel After Postmodernism 627

opposed thinking in dualities). This return of fiction to "life" of


course stimulated the search for adequate narrative forms. Yet there
are limits to the human creative spirit and its power of innovation.
After the extreme defamiliarizations and deconstructions in
twentieth-century literature and art, there was no space left for a new
avantgarde. Literature had to be satisfied with small variations of that
which already had been experimented with, with experimental
mixtures of the given and the inclusion of the problematics of the
present. What one could build upon was that which connects
modernism, postmodernism, and the new realism: the fundamental
desire for narrative, for its ability to familiarize the world, to make
connections, and to create models of understanding. The choice of
realism in fiction was not an isolated phenomena but could depend
on analogic preferences in politics and culture. After the fall of the
Soviet Empire and the failure of programmatic ideologies, a common
effort emerged to move toward a global pragmatic realism. The
philosopher and sociologist Ulrich Beck has called his latest book
“For a Cosmopolitical Realism”. Just as the new realism in politics
and social programs sought to improve the modes of communication
and advance mutual understanding and the sense of order, the realist
ventures in literature aimed at repairing the lack of communication in
fiction with an intersubjectively guaranteed system of representation
and at creating artistic forms of order within the inundated texture of
signifiers. What could integrate these efforts and give them a
meaningful artistic structure was the familiarizing and healing power
of telling and interpreting stories.
The return of realism did not trigger jubilant reactions with the
writers concerned, who knew very well that many compromises were
necessary in the concepts, structures, and styles of fiction but decided
to accept the epistemological limitations of realism as obvious and go
on from there with a new experimentalism, whose defamilarizing
devices appeared as important as the realist agenda, a perception
which prevented them from proclaiming a new program of pure
realist innovation. Though the postmodernists could not respond to
the challenges of the era of realist reorientation, because they
regarded the desire for the real as illusory and replaced it with the
concepts of knowledge or rather lack of knowledge, of subversion, of
irony, free play, and the incomprehensible paradox, their spirit of
deconstruction and defamiliarization could help the realists to find
628 From Modernism to Postmodernism

their own way towards the balance between the familar and the
unfamilar, the explainable and the unexplainable. In 1997, DeLillo
said in an interview in The New York Times: “what's been missing
over these past twenty-five years is the sense of a manageable
reality”, but he adds: “We seem much more aware of elements like
randomness and ambiguity and chaos since then”. According to Italo
Calvino, it would be indeed simplistic and faulty after all the
modernizations of art and literature to believe that one could still tell
a story in a naive manner. In his view, literature has to be prepared to
meet a world that is built and controlled by the intellect. The central
question for all post-postmodern writers then would be, how can
narration find a way in-between the refound storytelling impulse and
the reflection of a world defined by intellectuality? Literature should
take the intellect under its roof, Calvino said. It is literature that can
present the intellect with a “strict geometry” but in an “indissoluble
tangle” so that the intellect is forced to make fantastic headstands in
its very own region, normality, and thus find out its abnormality.
Though Calvino is one of the foremost postmodern writers, this
“antifinalistic” view of what he calls the “irritating engagement” of
literature would be, if interpreted nonrestrictively, not a bad
description of the kinds of narrative that follow the postmodern era.
David Foster Wallace called their approach “neurotic realism”, the
neurosis of realism being the postmodern heritage.
The most general description of the post-postmodern novel
would have to underline a return to the three paradigms of ordering
the world that characterize the American novel in general and that
postmodern fiction tried to relativize or negate but confirmed even ex
negativo because they contain universal truths. These narrative
patterns are: (1) a system of dualisms, building upon the elementary
oppositions of good and evil, nature and civilization, knowledge and
nonknowledge, identity and nonidentity, in short, order and chaos; (2)
the contrast between the American Dream and American reality,
between the humanistic ideals of freedom, equality, and happiness for
all and the failure to realize them; (3) the difference between
appearance and reality, which is the paradigm of the Eurpean realistic
novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and is directed, also
in its American form, towards the analysis of the relationship between
the individual and society, including the examination of moral
standards and moral hypocrisy. The introduction into this framework
The Novel After Postmodernism 629

of the awareness of the fundamental uncertainty and indefiniteness in


all spheres of life required the transgression of the normal, the
ordinary, and the explainable and their confrontation of the characters
with the abnormal, the extraordinary, and the unexplainable. These
new experiments with negation profited from postmodern
perspectives and their narrative strategies, insofar as they emphasized
mobility and the void, the mysterious and the grotesque.
One continuing legacy of the deconstructive turn and the
postmodern experimentalism is that change, mobility, and becoming
have to be accepted as the defining constituents of our world and also
of the identity of the individual. Almost all the characters in whatever
type of novel in the contemporary literary scene are more mobile than
they traditionally used to be, they experience breaks in their lives and
careers, explained or unexplained, they change their lives out of
rational or irrational reasons, and are more instable in their thoughts
and feelings than the modernist concept of the authenticity of
character would allow. It seems that the introduction of this inner and
outer mobility is one of the factors that makes the reintroduction of
full-sized characters and their leading role in fiction acceptable, just
as the greater role of mobility as chance, coincidence, and the break
of sequence and logic strengthened the new re-evaluation of plot. The
fundamental mobility of making sense creates indefiniteness,
uncertainty, and instability in the ways of life, in thoughts and
feelings, and thus provides a basic ambiguity, which in some ways is
not so disssimilar to the ambiguities of the modern novel. The
response is what Toni Morrison in Song of Solomon called “a deep
concern for and about human relationships” (150). As a character in
DeLillo's Underworld remarks, in "the Kennedy years [...] well-
founded categories began to seem irrelevant [...] a certain fluid
movement became possible" (571). All of the novels named in the
following passages can be cited as examples of these trends towards a
more complex, mobile, or fluid view of character and plot, a tendency
which includes in a number of cases the combination of the "real" and
the fantastic, the fantastic being another legacy of the postmodern
narrative, indicating a greater mobility within the modes of re-
presenting the world.
630 From Modernism to Postmodernism

10.2. The Gap and the Void, The Mysterious and the Grotesque

A second postmodern legacy, closely related to the first, is the


gap or the void, which are present in almost all postmodern texts in
one way or another.The gap and the void also take their place in the
novels since the nineties. They appear in the lives, the experiences
and thoughts of the characters, in the plot and its sequence and in the
interpretation or rather interpretability of the characters or the themes
that they impersonate, for instance love. The ineffable takes the form
of a mystery, a “paradoxical verity” (Coover) that disrupts the
continuity and explainability of what happens and is the only unity
and wholeness that exists. Contrasting the modes of our existence in a
matter-of-fact style, the new sobriety finds its field of experiment in
the opposition of two poles: (1) the everyday life, its striving for
happiness and solidarity, and its failure to combine both, and (2) the
mystery, embodied in unexplainable and uncontrollable change,
change in emotion, thought, personality, or circumstances. What
makes the life of these people interesting and gives them their
universal aspect is that between the ordinary everyday life and the
extraordinay personal turn, there is a void, both promising and
refusing possibilities. The different types of novels that use it certify
to the wide range of this structural pattern. At this point examples
may be listed without further explanation, to which we will add later:
Richard Ford, The Sportswriter (1986); Paul Auster, The New York
Trilogy:City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room (1988) and his later
novels; Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987) or Paradise (1997); Don
DeLillo, Underworld (1997); Philip Roth, American Pastoral (1998);
Cormac McCarthy's Southern novels and his Western Border Trilogy,
All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1995), Cities of the Plain
(1998); Louise Erdrich, Gardens in the Dunes (1999), or The Last
Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2000); and all the novels
of the writers of the so-called “New American School”: Jonathan
Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, David Foster Wallace, and Richard
Powers, a number of whose works we will discuss later in more
detail.

One might argue that the important role of the mysterious


derives from the fact that it actually functions as the "substitute" for
the creation of new form. Once the character faces existential gaps of
The Novel After Postmodernism 631

knowledge and the writer or narrator gives up his or her attitude of


omniscience and absolute authority, the mysterious can provide all
styles of narrative with a paradoxical focal point, a puzzling concrete
target, an imprecise and unclosed narrative argument ( the target
being a person, border-crossings, a striking event, the people of a
town, the atomic bomb, the overflow of waste, the Vietnam War,
etc.). Working with the gap, the void, the mysterious as central modes
of conception, discourse may turn into a riddle without having to
define it or relate it to the interiority of the self or relativize it in the
modern way by the wholeness and autonomy of aesthetic form, in
Lukács's terms the “ersatz for God”. The riddle then is in fact the
narative form. By circling around, questioning, protesting, or
accepting the inexplicable, a certain new freedom of approach, of the
dissemination of perspectives, of the deferral of judgement, of a
doubling and multiplying of stories can be attained.
The disappearance of certainty and the emergence of the
uncertain and inexplainable, of the gap and the mystery of the void
are wide-spread phenomena in the post-postmodern novel. The
mysterious often grows out of the grotesque, the deformation of
humans by humans, which acts as the basis and cause of the
mysterious and and gives it a critical aspect. Jean-Francois Lyotard
had defined “the postmodern condition” as “that which searches for
new presentations [...] in order to impart a stronger sense of the
unpresentable” (81). The search for new presentations of the
unpresentable, of the radical perspectives of negation was a
postmodern concern. Thus the interrelation of the mysterious and the
grotesque is also a postmodern legacy. Coover's postmodern novel
John's Wife (1996), for instance, thematizes “grotesque miscreations”
(96), combined with “the elusive mystery masked by surface flux”
(249). “The Mystery” (216) as the base and end of all efforts to attain
knowledge in a rationally understood universe is the ground on which
the paradox rests. In “a paradox-ridden universe of ours, bereft of
certainties” (370), John’s wife is placed at “the dark inscrutable heart
of paradox” (285). Paul Auster, a quite different author, who does not
belong to the close circle of postmodern writers, takes up the theme of
the mystery of life. Referring to his Moon Palace (1989), The Music
of Chance (1990), and also to The New York Trilogy, he notes: “The
unknown is rushing in on top of us at every moment. As I see it, my
job is to keep myself open to these collisions, to watch out for all
632 From Modernism to Postmodernism

these mysterious goings-on in the world” (1992 273). A long line of


writers take up a similar program and connect it with the grotesque. In
the following paragraphs, a few widely different examples will be
discussed.
In DeLillo's Underworld the force of history appears as the
force of the grotesque, the (self)destruction of humans by humans, but
it is also the appearance of the mysterious. Waste is the secret
“underhistory” of the atomic tests; the garbage side of nuclear
weapons; waste, is the mysterious “underworld” in persons, relations
and objects. Nick Shay, the waste specialist and main character of the
book, sees waste “everywhere because it is everywhere” (283). Below
the relativizing circumstances of the quotidian and the fragmented
structure of the book lies the mystery of the “contradictions of being
[...] the inner divisions of people and systems” (444), the infinite
fatality of distorting deadly connections that all center on the atomic
bomb and produce chaos. Secrecy, the unknown, the mystery of
relations that leave open gaps, problems, and questions characterize
all people in the book in one way or another. In an earlier interview
DeLillo said about his novel White Noise: “I think my work has
always been informed by mystery; the final answer, if there is one at
all, is outside the book” (DeCurtis 55). The grotesque, the origin and
foundation of the mysterious human “underworld”, has its own image
in the epilogue of the book. Nick visits a “downwind” radiation clinic,
called by the guide Victor the “Museum of the Misshapen”, located at
a remote site in Kazakhstan, the former territory of the Soviet Union,
where the victims of the nuclear arms' race are shut away in order to
be “studied” in their misshapenness:

It is the victims who are blind. It is the boy with skin where his eyes ought to
be, a bolus of spongy flesh, oddly like a mushroom cap, springing from each
brow. It is the bald-headed children standing along a wall in their underwear,
waiting to be examined. It is the man with the growth beneath his chin, a
thing with a life of its own, embryonic and pulsing. It is the dwarf girl who
wears a T-shirt advertising a Gay and Lesbian Festival in Hamburg,
Germany, bottom edge dragging on the floor. It is the cheerful cretin who
walks the halls with his arms folded. It is the woman with features intact but
only half a face somehow, everything fitted into a tilted arc that floats above
her shoulders like the crescent moon (800).

Philip Roth in his later books changed his focus to concentrate


on a larger social scene. In his novel American Pastoral, Nathan
The Novel After Postmodernism 633

Zuckerman, the narrator, writes about the life of Swede Levov, a


former star athlete from his school, whom he met at a class reunion,
and who as a “superman of certainties” (144) “had been most simple
and ordinary [...] right in the American grain”. He becomes
interesting for the narrator because the Swede experienced a
painstaking “tragic fall” by the “explosion of his daughter's bomb in
1968”, killing four people in an anti-Vietnam War terror act. The act
of his daughter during “that mysterious, troubling, extraordinary,
historical transition” is “chaos from start to finish”, an inexplicable
act of “the grotesque [...] supplanting everything commonplace that
people love about this country” (348). It “transports him out of the
longed-for American pastoral into everything that is its antithesis and
its enemy, into the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the
counterpastoral – into the indiginous American berserk” (86). It is
indeed “the end of all understanding”: “the inexplicable had forever
displaced whatever he once thought he knew” (265f.). In the end,
there are only “this horrible riddle” (131), “its mysterious inroads”
(123), and “the mystery of his mystery” (30), which in spite of the
Swede's unbearable suffering “cannot be cracked by thinking”. The
breach in his fortification “now that it was opened would not be
closed again” (423).
Toni Morrison's Paradise ranges in time over more than eighty
years from the Reconstruction to the 1970s, and in space from
Lousiana to Oklahoma, creating a kind of black American saga of
attaining freedom by going west. It focuses on a double exodus of
emancipated black families who follow a utopian inspiration: first
from the Mississippi Delta trekking westward to the Territories,
finally establishing their own town with the telling name of Haven.
Then there is second exodus after the town falls into hopeless decline,
initiated by the Depression. The new settlement, Ruby, an all-black
town with the population of 360, 240 miles west of Haven, is founded
in a spirit of nostalgia and new hope for the future. But hope does not
last. Uncertainty leads to intolerance and grotesque violence and ends
in the feeling that human desires, emotions, and thoughts are
inexplicable in their extreme consequences. The central mystery at the
end turns into the form of a riddle: “How could so clean and blessed a
mission devour itself and become the world it had escaped?” (292)
The utopian spirit, the trust in God, the sense of care, of mutual
responsibility, and communal spirit, which were the reasons for their
634 From Modernism to Postmodernism

double exodus, finally have reversed themselves into the spirit and the
deeds of the grotesque, the deformation of humans by humans, the
senseless killing of a motley of homeless women outsiders, drifters,
who have gathered more or less by chance in a strange place, in the
so-called “Convent", seventeen miles outside the town. Tony
Morrison, a symbolic realist, has fitted the characters and the plot into
a broad symbolic plan, a pattern of faith and and mystery, the mystery
of faith, the reification of faith, the surfacing of evil and, at the end,
the mystery of spiritual redemption, born out of the grotesqueness and
mystery of evil. This book, like the others defined by the spirit of
mystery, demonstrates the loss of innocence and faith, the paralyzing
force of tradition, and the blighting consequences of emotional and
physical violence — but also the never-dying spirit of hope.
In Cormac McCarthy's novels the stage of mystery is not the
human world but the universe. Humans participate in the mystery and
stem themselves against it by violent action. He thematizes human
perversity and vice, evil in its inexplicable form, the fact “that there is
no order in the world save that which death has put there” (1994 a
45). The novels of the Border Trilogy are exercises in unprovoked
violence and evil, not to be motivated and understood by any
psychologizing but to be affirmed in their inexplicable presence that
is projected upon a barren, violent, torturedly beautiful, inconsolable
landscape and rendered in an utterly detached blend of conventional
and surreal styles. Their behavior testifying to an irrational, immoral,
even unnatural anti-common sense, John Grady Cole of All the Pretty
Horses and Billy Parham of The Crossing traverse on horseback the
border between the American Southwest and Mexico, between
civilization and nature, the known and the unknown, between order
and chaos, intentionally or instinctively in search of the ultimate
experience in a universe that is empty of sense, and in whose world of
the unknowable and the void only violence can state the individual
presence. The Crossing is not so much a sequence of All the Pretty
Horses than a loose variation of its themes of trial, violence, loss,
manhood, fate, all in the same geographical constellation of border-
crossing, thus emphasizing the elemental, mythic quality of their
experiences. In this kind of universe, “the light of the world was in
men's eyes for the world itself moved in eternal darkness and
darkness was its true nature and true condition and [...] in this
darkness it turned with perfect cohesion in all its parts but [...] there
The Novel After Postmodernism 635

was naught there to see” (1994 a 283). The old human stories are here
acted out again and again, destined to doom, but indefatigably re-
peated in inexplicable cruelty and kindness and a sense of mystery,
the mystery of being only oneself, the mystery of “mak[ing] the
world. To make it again and again. To make it in the very maelstrom
of its undoing” (1994b 56). In the posthumanistic and postsocial spirit
of these books which offer no consolation beyond the self and its
power, the grotesqueness of violence loses its antihumanistic context
and stands out in a neutral space of non-evaluation and mystery that
takes on atavistic traits.
It is obvious that the post-postmodern novel of the nineties, still
under the direct influence of the postmodern experiments, also
participates in games with the gap, the void and the mysterious, even
if it chooses a realist method. Whereas McCarthy's novels radicalize
and universalize the mystery of cruelty and violence in the
transhuman sphere, Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho (1991)
radicalizes the mystery of grotequeness in the human domain. The
series of violent murders committed by the Wall Street entrepreneur
and serial killer Patrick Bateman, the “monster of reality” (304) in
American Psycho, remains without cause and consequence, without
synchronization with character, social condition or circumstances, or
justice since the murderer goes without punishment and tells his own
story without emotion or productive insights but with the most
gruesome details of his unmotivated, unimaginable atrocities. To the
grotesque mystery of the murders is added the mystery of the
uninterpretability of the murderer, whose self-reflective insights are
invalidated by the laconic, unemotional, unengaged tone in which he
reports them and their remaining unconnected to what one would call
a character's self and by his terrible urge “to engage [...] in homicidal
behavior on a massive scale” (338). The report of both his deeds and
his thoughts remains on a consistent level of mere description that
does not point to anything beyond itself: “I grind bone and fat and
flesh into patties and [...] it does sporadically penetrate how
unacceptable some of what I'm doing actually is” (345). By reducing
both factual description and meaning-giving reflection to the
emptiness of words, Ellis makes them ironize one another in what one
might call a “perfomance” of meaninglessness. In Bateman's
comment: “there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about
myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling [...]
636 From Modernism to Postmodernism

This confession has meant nothing” (377). Ironically Ellis's realist


minimalism turns out to be a form of maximalism in the
deconstruction of meaning, following and radicalizing the line of
Hawkes's The Cannibal, Heller's Catch 22, Kosinski's The Painted
Bird, or Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.
What connects all these divergent books, and many others too,
is, to quote Auster again, “the presence of the unpredictable, the
utterly bewildering nature of human experience” (1992 262). The
texts demonstrate that the category of the mysterious can have two
quite different foundations, an ethical one, provided by the grotesque,
and an epistemological one, furnished by the random, the
simultaneous, and contradictory, in short, by the radically strange and
uncertain. In the first case the mysterious is human-centered; in the
second it is cosmos-oriented and called fate, randomness, emptiness,
and chaos. Both kinds of course blend, but the relationship of
dominance between the two gives the individual novel its individual
contours. In all these cases the novel attempts to give over-all
uncertainty an image and to define it in a narrative design of order and
chaos, however, without any longer being able to relate order and
chaos in a meaningful way. There is always the gap and the void.
Ellis’s American Psycho proceeds furthest in transferring the
meaninglessness directly into the realist style. The author splits up the
representational system of realism, which consists of description and
interpretation, and places the gap, the void within the representational
form, the realist rhetoric, so that there is no connection between
quotidian surface details and interpretative meaning, leaving a space
of emptiness between the two which represents chaos. If one looks at
this style of splitting description and interpretation from the
postmodern viewpoint, what we have here then reveals itself as an
intentionally counterfeit realism, an ironic subversion of the illusion,
one that could directly represent and make sense of the real. Ellis’s
procedure is actually a combination of two aspects of the postmodern
paradox (which in contrast to the modern paradox refuses any kind of
meaningful synthesis), one inherent in the content, the other ingrained
in the form. Both together create a parody of realism but at the same
time a confirmation of realism — however, a realism that reveals the
limits and the illusion of realism by a serial mode of merely
performing empty representation, which does not have a meaningful
frame of reference beyond chaos.
The Novel After Postmodernism 637

10.3. Strategies of Excess

As has already been indicated, a third legacy of postmodern


fiction is the penchant for maximalism in every form, in short, for
excess. One example may demonstrate how this method of excess in
the late stage of postmodern fiction finally deconstructs itself,
overreaching its possibilities and turning too far into the area of the
“impossible”, to quote Sukenick's description of the postmodern
agenda. The example is Robert Coover's The Adventures of Lucky
Pierre: Directors' Cut (2002), a very late upshot of postmodern
fiction. Two other books may illustrate how the strategies of excess
outside the “classic” postmodern fiction are successfully employed in
two novels of the nineties that belong to the best fiction in the last
stage of the twentieth century. Harold Brodkey's The Runaway Soul
(1991) is successful by psychologizing excess, David Foster
Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996) by multiple coding that blurs the border-
lines between surface and depth, serialism and existentialism, the
serious and the comic, analysis and entertainment. According to The
Seattle Times, it is “a work of genius [...] grandly ambitious, wickedly
comic, a wild, surprisingly readable tour de force”.
William Gass's The Tunnel (1995), which was 30 years in
progress, already shows a certain depletion of the postmodern
strategies of excess, especially in the book’s formal schemes. Their
failures become more visible ten years after its publication. Gass
seeks multiple and extreme ways of fracturing the standard use and
continuous course not only of the story but also of the language, of
the script types, of the arrangement of the text, of the texture and
design of the page. He inserts poetry into the prose and underlays the
language with an exhaustive, rather disturbing, and functionless
network of dirty words, which might be seen, if one wants to be
sarcastic, to serve as a special kind of contribution to the pool of
linguistic innovation. All these means of fragmentation become
repetitive, redundant, and boring because they are not really
complemented with a variation of perspectives that would add to the
formal exertions the lightness of play, the most important and
efficient postmodern modal strategy. What is missing in the over-
complexity of the text is what has been called, paradoxically, an
“arbitrary necessity”. The book is a striking example of what the
638 From Modernism to Postmodernism

ideology of innovation can do to a writer at the end of an epoch, when


it becomes his strait-jacket. Compared with this, the post-postmodern
novel has one advantage, if it is an advantage: It is able to start
without ideological obligations.
While Gass's Tunnel reveals signs of exhaustion, Coover's
novel The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Directors' Cut (2002) is the
perfect example of the final decay of the “classic” postmodern
narrative and the distortion of its compelling urge towards innovation.
It seems as if (and not only for Coover) the obsession with the (male)
body and its sexual organ is the last resort for innovation at the end of
its turn, where the writer hopes to regain its shock effect. In this book
the adventures of Lucky Pierre, part pornstar, part clown, part
everyman, filmed by his nine female muse-directors in the
utopian/dystopian frozen Cinecity, are arranged around his famous,
oversized, naked sexual organ, always in public view in film and
“reality” (the difference between the two evaporating) and admired
and rejoiced in by his muses, each with her own creative and sexual
inclinations and obsessions, and by the jubilant public as well. Pierre's
“serial experiences” (117), riding on his “dick”, are conceived as an
“archetypal drama” (272), fusing sexual and artistic potency in the
tradition of Henry Miller. Yet in spite of the book's outrageous sexual
fantasies and metamorphoses, Pierre's adventures are not saved from
finally boring the reader by repetition and excess. This excess in
repetition and variation characterizes parties and grand orgies
(“decaying into chaos” [171]), film projections, demonstrations, riots,
and “guerilla warfare” (287). Excess also shows in the multicoding of
Pierre's adventures, which, in addition to being existentialized through
suffering and pain, gain additional dimensions by the ways they
parody and caricature (and are parodied and caricatured by) clichés of
heroism, of “the mysterious stranger, the prodigal son, the legendary
righter of wrongs” (289), or stereotypes of fairy tales and the “sacred
quest” “on the perilous path, as it is said, to the center of all
existence” (317). The ramifications of the sexual organ penetrate
“deep in the universal essence” (269), linking (ironically) the
“visionary mode of fucking” “mysteriously [...] to an eternal truth”
(135), to the “DEVOUT EFFORT TO ATTAIN
TRANSCENDENCY; TO UNIFY THE WORLD’S MAD
SCATTER” (137) and ultimately to the divine order. The identity
question is clarified by defining the novel’s “antiestablishment hero”
The Novel After Postmodernism 639

(289) simply as “a man who fucks”, with fucking as “his karma”


(135), a man “who will fuck, in effect, the city itself, and thus the
world and, in so doing, will save it from itself” (315). In spite of his
unlimited metamorphoses and the disrupted codes of order that are all
“fucked up” (327), he is presented as a man who “wants continuity”
(215) but “has no free will” (213), who is “chased by an
indiscriminate flood of humanity” (224). As a “living legend” who
was “once the idol of the masses” (275), he becomes in his older age
the victim of “pain and humiliation” (283), a “castaway” (373), the
mere model for robots that are formed as imitations of “his various
career phases” and are the “hottest product” (343) when sold. He feels
himself “parodied” (86), his “empty desolation” (326) verifies “the
old maxim: Aesthetic interest in a subject sucks away that subject's
being” (381), and underlines what one of the directors notes: “Who or
what is he beyond these movies we have made together?” (386) He
finally comes to mirror the "general uncertainty" (251) accompanying
heroism and human existence in general. The people in the novel are
“all performance, living invented lives of the scripted moment,
otherwise just negative space”; “Ceaseless flow, that's the ticket. Even
if of nothing but emptiness” (390). The “search for meaning” appears
more like an effort “to obliterate meaning” (393), but the “ineffable
mystery remains. This is the one truth he has” (395). The book,
however, ends with “sublime joy”, a final consummation which has
“never been as good as this, he is being carried completely out of
himself” (405). The postmodern concepts and practices of
“simultaneity and multiplicity and disruption” (173) are here meant to
parody by shock the clichés of traditional narrative, of meaning, of
beliefs, of concepts of identity, but again they overreach themselves
by excess and parody their own intentions and strategies. Intended or
not, the result is the parody of parodies, the parody of postmodern
strategies. In addition, whatever direction the double-coded parody
may take, it ironizes, and in turn is ironized by, the existential
exposure of the anti-hero within the great sex hero to the pains of
disappointment, of loneliness and homelessness, which introduce the
realist view into the fantastic compositions of the book, together with
the universal themes of the contrast between the past and the present,
between gain and loss, happiness and pain. Other postmodern
novelists (especially Pynchon, Gaddis and Barth, but also Coover in
his earlier books) have been successful with the introduction and
640 From Modernism to Postmodernism

often fusion of the existential view with the playful and the comic
perspectives, with irony and parody. This novel's melange, however,
is not much more than a piece of late and desperate post-modern
sportsmanship, in which none of the parts fit together under any
terms.
The strategy of excess employed by a calculating aesthetic
intellectuality (or intellectual aesthetics) of course is not by definition
something negative. The most outstanding postmodern novels by
Pynchon, Barth, Gaddis and others achieve their greatest literary
successes by the strategies of excess. They may express themselves in
complications of plot, the cast of characters, in the multicoding of
perspectives, or the exuberance in style and the complexity of the
general approach. The scheme of excess is one of the legacies of
postmodern art that even after the high time of postmodern literature
had ended could still create very important literary works by the
infusion of new energy. Its adoption by two authors outside the well-
known circle of postmodern writers, Harold Brodkey in The Runaway
Soul and David Foster Wallace in Infinite Jest, created two
masterpieces, in spite of the inherent problems of lateness and the too-
much that we discussed above. It is clear that the transitional situation
of the nineties was broad enough to allow the design, so to speak
belatedly, of two of the most radical narrative experiments in literary
history, whose innovative constructedness and scarcely contained
excessiveness would hardly have been possible without the
postmodern experiments and their continuing influence. What
connects these formally and thematically quite contrary experiments
is the obvious passion for multimodality, for fullness of perspectives
on life, for completeness, which in both cases motivate and justify
excess. In the one case excess is the means of researching the
mysteries of the human mind and soul in the ramifications of a
person’s consciousness, and in the other case the mode of excess is
used to register the mysteries of human behavior in an observation of
an enormous number of characters, mostly centered in a limited
space, the region of Boston. What connects these two extraordinary
novels with the fiction of the nineties in general is the important status
assigned to the unexplainable, the ineffable, and the mysterious,
which in these cases, as in the others, results from the complexity of
human minds and conditions.
The Novel After Postmodernism 641

Harold Brodkey's novel, with the apt title The Runaway Soul,
follows a psycho-aesthetic line and employs the method of excess for
the search into the complications of consciousness, not so much into
the authenticity of a character, which would have been the modern
variant. This strategy allows the fusion of existential question with a
multicodal and playful approach. According to a publicity notice, the
book focuses on the extraordinary sensibility of the mentally quick,
obsessively ruminative, alternatively grandiose and self-doubting
mind and imagination of a Wiley Silenowicz. The 835-page novel has
been rightly called “an epic adventure in consciousness”, whose
teeming, converging, refracting ideas, feelings, and attitudes become
both self-serving and serving to color “the compulsive concern with
his mother's overpowering nature, his father's seductiveness, his
sister's pathological jealousy, his own mystical yearning for oneness”,
and later, in adolescence and adulthood, the various permutations of
sexuality in a ceaseless search for love. All this is undertaken with a
rash and shameless, tender, and fearless attitude, for which nothing is
alien, and which thematically is ultimately directed towards the
question of good and evil and its relevance to him and the persons he
is related to. The search for unity in multiplicity is here obsessively
personalized and at the same time radically extended and
transpersonalized by the excessive, multifarious, multimodal
ruminations of “the Runaway Soul”, “flying and trying and crying and
lying and dying”. The vagaries of the mind in action produce endless
processes and no final results. The Runaway Soul must run and never
stop. An end and completeness cannot be attained by lasting insights
because truth is fluid and moving. Since truth is complex, it moves in
both exhilarating and painful variations of projections and modalities
of consciousness, never allowing the person to know which is more
important, mind and soul or the conditions and interrelations in which
a person finds himself or herself. The book is a successful integration
of the existential, the playful, and the ironic ruminations of the mind,
or, to use the term of the book, the “soul” (a term that both
postmodern and post-postmodern fiction mostly do not know what to
make of ), because the excessive and boundless musings of the mind
are contained, bound, and dramatized by always pushing against the
limits of human consciousness.
642 From Modernism to Postmodernism

While Brodkey's novel chooses the multimodality and the


dynamics of the inner view as guideline, employing excess to explore
the flow of the mental and emotional life, David Foster Wallace's
again aptly named, 1079-page novel Infinite Jest, which has been
rightly compared to Beckett, Pynchon, and Gaddis, provides a cool
view from outside, diving into the richness of human behavior with a
limitless imagination, a disruptive energy, an audaciously inventive
prose, and a weird fun game. Wallace's's book is unwieldy by its
length, by its excess in language games, and by its enormous cast of
mostly “whacked-out” characters imprisoned in their souls' cages,
often differentiated only through their peculiarities, forming a
collection of names that act as strategic meeting points along which
the story travels in a serial composition, relying on the situation as the
ordering principle but keeping the balance between situation and
theme, and developing images of a few main characters. The free-
wheeling linguistic style fabricates fantasticated chapter headings and
an immense quantity of interspersed abbreviations for important
institutions and programs that are hardly available in their
complicated meaning to the reader over a longer stretch of time, and
finally adds 388 footnotes, which contrast in tone and matter to the
light, playful, ironic, and comic tenor of the main part of the book and
yet, like the rush of abbreviations and the peculiar chapter headings,
at the same time confirm the ironic touch of the infinite jest by being
disruptive to the text’s flow and disturbing to the reader. This
disruptive tendency is strengthened by a composition that changes its
place, characters, and scene almost every chapter, giving equal room
to people, things, and space, fashioning a sequence without logical
system, except for an anxious sense for oppressive details adding
them up as specimens of a crippled existence.
The factual base of the story is an addicts’ halfway house and a
tennis academy, with the competitive activities surrounding the tennis
game. The family of the former director of the tennis academy, Dr.
James Incandenza (who committed suicide), his wife, and their three
sons, Orin, Hal and Mario, and then Don Gately, cook and shopper at
the Ennet House, are the main characters, surrounded by a crowd of
pupils from the tennis academy and inmates of Ennet House. The
satiric perspective, which, just like the comic mode, is always present
in one way or another, has its own specific playing field in a sideline
of the plot, the hilarious interface of two operators of the Office of
The Novel After Postmodernism 643

Unspecified Services, a Canadian espionage and terror organization.


They are the wheel-chaired Marathe and the bizarrely disguised
Steely, hidden in the outfit of a woman, who meet under fantastic
circumstances and in mutual distrust on a cliff outcropping high
above the city of Tuscon in Arizona. All the characters in the book are
distanced, flattened, and even obscured. They appear, in a calculated
tour de force, as strange, eccentric, weird, even fantastic in their
threatened condition, the term for which is “stasis”. The
representation of the main characters, however, is split between the
flatness of their appearance and their implied roundness, just as the
narrator's attitude towards them is split between the clinical outside
view and an empathetic attitude of participation that honors their
feelings of loss, disappointment, and frustration. This method
provides both a tension and a balance that keep up an equilibrium
between negation and affirmation, seriousness and infinite jest, and
respect for the individual human beings and their subordination under
an overall playful configuration. The novel achieves its challenging
and provocative, consistently innovative distinction by turning the
postmodern strategies of deconstruction and excess, of play, irony,
and the comic mode into an infinite jest, as the title indicates. While
the book uses the postmodern scheme for building up a text “both
free-associative and intricately structured” (185), the direction of the
infinite jest, in a profound study of the postmodern condition, turns on
the postmodern theories and practices themselves. They are used,
played with, and ironized at the same time. The book is a success in a
nonpostmodern way because it becomes clear that in all its
movements and with all available narrative strategies, it circles
around the enigma of human existence, which is the secret center of
the book.
Still, the book is excessively complex, and even in a successful
case like this the question finally must be posed as to how far this
complexity is complex for complexity's sake and for the unlimited
playfulness it allows. The answer would be that on the one hand it
responds to the utter uncertainty of human existence and the extreme
complexity of the situation of life at the end of the 20th century. On
the other hand, the writer chooses and experiments with the strategies
of a “putter-inner”, not a “leaver-outer”, to use Thomas Wolfe's
distinction of types of writers. That is, Wallace places himself within
the line of aesthetic maximalism, which has its own logic of always
644 From Modernism to Postmodernism

pushing to further limits in order to try out and “complete” aesthetic


possibilities of complexities. These complexities have occupied the
some of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, Joyce in Ulysses,
Pynchon in Gravity's Rainbow, Gaddis in The Recognitions, Barth in
The Sotweed Factor or Coover in The Public Burning, all of them
busy adding new subjects, new perspectives, new forms, and, with
Wallace, the fun games of the Infinite Jest in the attempt to further the
role and the capacity of literature of representing the largeness and
enigma of human consciousness. As to Wallace's Infinite Jest, one
must say that it is a worthy experiment in this line, adding to aesthetic
maximalism fun and “huge entertainment” (Review of Contemporary
Fiction). The result of this mixture is impressive, whether one likes it
or not.

10.4. Experiments with Realism and the Social View

At this point our discussion turns to what is the most important


contribution of the post-postmodern novel, its so-called realism. The
two books by Brodkey and Wallace are extreme and atypical cases in
the nineties, though they stand out for their imaginative grasp of
fictional possibilities in a period of transition and definitely belong in
an overview of the achievements of the post-postmodern novel. As
mentioned, the scenario of the typical contemporary American novel
(if there is such a thing) is defined by the recovery of the character
and the social environment and often the reintroduction of social
criticism, but also by the retention of the consciousness of uncertainty
and indefiniteness in the definition of reality, truth, and moral values.
This leads to a multimodal view of the world and the typical mixtures
of perspectives: the combination of the rational with the irrational, the
familiar with the unfamiliar, the ordinary with the extraordinary, the
certain with the mysterious, the "good" continuation with the gap and
the void. The (variable) interrelation of the explainable and the
unexplainable furnishes a multiperspective on the represented world
and gives it depth.
Toni Morrison in her novel Love provides a version of this
formula, which in her novels almost always takes the structure of a
paradox. In terms of her narrator, we live in a world “[w]here
everything is known and nothing is understood” (4). Though the
sociocritical horizon in contemporary fiction (and partly the visual
The Novel After Postmodernism 645

arts) suggests an attitude that makes itself “useful” and “relevant” and
instructional, Toni Morrison’s books are good examples of the fact
that the texts are the better the more the mysterious and the void (and
unexplained violence) temper the rational, the moral, and didactic
approach, as in her Beloved (1987). This celebrated novel is
ultimately about how it feels to kill what you love, out of love, to
believe it possible to love your daughter so much that her life is yours
to take. In her novel Love, love is as much affliction and delusion as
joy, and it again breeds violence. Philip Roth's much-praised realist
novels American Pastoral (1997) and The Human Stain (2000) gain
their impetus both by the ineffability of human behavior, in the first
case by the violence of war (Vietnam) and the violent, terrorist anti-
war reaction of a young American woman, in the second case by the
consequences of the attempt of a college professor to hide his black
heritage and pretend to be a white man. In fact, the most successful
combination of the two, personal void and the scenario of the
ineffable on the one hand and the rationalism and criticism of realism
on the other, is achieved when both the social and the personal aspects
are fused in what one might call basic elemental mixtures, mixtures of
blood or gender in a character dramatized in its adaptation to the
social environment. Striking examples are the white-black mixture in
Philip Roth’s The Human Stain and Richard Powers’s The Time of
Our Singing (2003). The undefined gender of a young girl who turns
out to be a boy and the personal and social complications evolving
from such a situation are the subjects of Jeffrey Eugenides's
celebrated Middlesex (2002).The American Indian novel gains its
status and success through its natural closeness to the mysterious and
ineffable, by what Scott Momaday called “the ancestral voice”, which
it infuses into its realist argument and rational social criticism. Some
examples include the novels by Momaday, by Leslie Marmon Silko,
and Louise Erdrich, which are quoted below.
The gap and the void, the irrational and the inexplainable are
often coupled, especially in the ethnic novel, with a thematic pattern
consisting of conspiration, violence, and terror, of victimization,
victim, and paranoia. It does not take the demonic form it has in the
postmodern novels of, for instance, Pynchon and Hawkes who
thematize a human condition where the human being appears to be at
the mercy of abstract powers that can do with a person as they please,
so that the character has no choice but to accede to the role of victim,
646 From Modernism to Postmodernism

to rebel hopelessly against it, or to do both, mostly haunted in the


process by paranoia. Introduced into a specific social context,
conspiracy and violence can give the the struggle for power a thriller-
like matrix of drama and suspense. Victimization and the role of
victim deepen and often change the character. The opposition and
interrelation of violator and victim both heighten suspense and
intensify the pressure on the victim. Almost all post-postmodern
novels take over elements of this pattern in order to create the
extraordinary in contrast to the ordinary and to use the extraordinary
for a multimodal and sometimes also comic view.
An example of the simpler kind of novel is Jonathan Franzen's
early novel The Twenty-Seventh City (1988). The ordinary in this
book is both the habitual routine of the city administration in St.Louis
and the normal life of one of its prominent citizen. The extraordinary
focuses on a plot of rivalry, conspiration, and violence over a city
renewal project. In this, Franzen’s first novel, the factual base of the
conspiracy story is still compounded with postmodern features of
excess that hurt the plausability of the machinations of the plot but
provide the text with the characteristics of a thriller and a seriocomic
perspective on top of its realist base. The major victim of the
conspirations and terror is the family of Martin Probst, the leading
building contractor in the city and one of its most highly respected
citizens, but as the president of an association of conservative local
dignitaries is also an obstacle to the renewal plans of the new female
chief of police. This fact demonstrates that this book, in addition to
everything else, is already a family novel in disguise, and thus the
book points to further developments of the novel in the nineties and
after. In the later realist books by the authors of the nineties, almost
invariably the family is the ordinary base and starting point of the
narrative process, from which character and plot take their way out
and to which they often (have to) return (or significantly not return) in
order to bear witness of experiences, and thus constituting meaning or
nonmeaning between beginning and end. The “natural” family life,
which as such would “normally” be conceived as a haven of security
and order, is made the direct victim of the break-in of the
extraordinary and the decay of order; but then the “normal” stance of
“tragedy” that would fit here is lightened by the actually “unnormal”
and “unfitting” comic view, which, however, under the circumstances
is fitting because it is needed to complete the realistic multimodal
The Novel After Postmodernism 647

appearance of the human world. After Chip, one of the sons from
Franzen's novel The Corrections, and his companions have been
robbed during a political upheaval in Lithuania by the police, he
thinks again of Marx’s idea that tragedy in a second stage is written as
farce, and now applying this “revelation” in his mind to the draft of
his screenplay “The Academy Purple” left in New York, he cries out
loud: “Make it ridiculous. Make it ridiculous” (534).
Jeffrey Eugenides, a colleague and friend of Franzen’s, once
called him in a lecture a “postpostmodernist”, and this term applies to
Eugenides as well. Both authors grew up “backwards”, as Eugenides
said. They mastered the experiment before the convention, or rather,
for them the experiment actually was the convention: “Before we
learned to tell stories we deconstructed them”. Both Franzen’s and
Eugenides’s later books show that they have learned to tell stories in a
more sober and temperate way. The scheme of the novel they
developed is double-poled. On the one hand there is a contraction of
the social scene towards the family group, which could and should act
as a solid foundation, though it often does not. But still, it remains a
center from which its descendants could grow and prosper, though
they often do not. On the other hand, this contracted scene is extended
into wider social analyses and social criticism converging on the
topical vices of the time and extending the geographical and social
scope far beyond the home region. They are what one might term
novels of “collections” because they collect and coordinate their
material from all kinds of social issues, topical themes, historical
events, scientific problems, conspiration and violence, and so on.
Franzen’s novel The Corrections (2001), a “book which is
funny, moving, generous, brutal, and intelligent” (The Guardian,
UK), focuses on a dysfunctional Midwestern family, the Lamberts,
whose problems originate not only from outside the family as in
Franzen's first novel, but from both outer and inner dilemmas: a
combination of epistemological concerns, moral disorientation, and
existential problems that are personified in various forms in the
members of the family. Theme and character blend. Alfred, the
patriarch of the family, is a retired engineer, whose life has gone to
pieces while he was fighting for order in disorder. He had to realize
that the “leading edge of time” and its progress made him always face
a “new ungrasped world”, so that the “ungrasped existence” (66) had
to remain a mystery forever. He dies slowly from an illness similar to
648 From Modernism to Postmodernism

Alzheimer’s, while his wife Enid wavers between a sacrificial


devotion to her husband and her children and a hopeless disappoint-
ment about the collapse of order in her family and her unfulfilled life,
which she has to face after what the book calls “the Blanket of Self-
Deception” (312) has been raised. All the three children are failures,
show signs of moral disorientation, and get into trouble one way or
the other. In their personal lives are reflected the typical contemporary
American experiences: success, neurosis, depression, fun, isolation,
despair, and love, the absence of love being painfully felt and its
presence often hidden behind a screen of indifference. The members
of the family are either unable to communicate, or they see one
another in a different light. A final gathering of the family for a
Christmas dinner planned by Enid as a desperate attempt to restore
harmony at least for once seems to be an unattainable goal; the
“catastrophic Christmas” breakfast (562) of all five members of the
family turns out to be rather an obstacle to happiness than a symbol of
it. The sociocritical motifs of the book reflect disorder and decay;
fictitious transactions, financial fraud, and pharmaceutical
“corrections” of depressed souls. The synthesis of family novel and
social panorama is formulated in the leading leitmotif “corrections”,
which functions as a hinge between private and social aspects and
creates an organic thematic center of connections. The novel develops
a system of counterbalancing forces, based on the principles of
opening and closing, in-going and out-going, of dividing and uniting,
whose dynamics activates a kinetic momentum, which, especially at
the end, after the catastrophic Christmas and during Alfred's final
decline sets the hopeful signs of a regeneration of sensibility and
communication against their former failings; at the same time, the
novel confirms the indispensability of the comic perspective right to
the end of the book. Franzen says in an essay that he has found a way
back to the community of readers and writers; he has also turned to
what is called a realism with a human face, which replaces, in his
terms, “tragic realism”.
Eugenides repeats and varies the pattern of the unnormal vs.
the normal in different but also multimodal terms. The Wall Street
Journal wrote that his first novel, The Virgin Suicides (1993), evokes
“the mixture of curiosity, lust, tenderness, morbidity, cynicism, and
the naiveté surrounding these bizarre events”, these bizarre events
being the suicide of five doomed sisters, which changes the lives of
The Novel After Postmodernism 649

the men, who are fiercely and awkwardly obsessed with the women's
untimely, spectacular demise. Only a year after Franzen's bestseller
Eugenides published his own highly praised bestseller, Middlesex
(2002). The book is about an extraordinary character, a hermaphrodite
who, the first sentence of the book makes clear, "was born twice, as a
baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day, in January of 1960;
and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergence room near
Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974." The family circle, as in
Franzen's The Corrections, is now the basis of the book. The
hermaphroditic daughter, Cal, is the object of the ordinary’s
transformation into the extraordinary; and the local family sphere is
extended into a breathtaking view of the twentieth century, the history
of fifty years of Greek immigration into the United States, with the
Turkish invasion of Smyrna in 1922, the flight of Cal's grandparents
for their lives, and a view back to a tiny village in Asia Minor, where
two lovers, Cal's grandparents and the rare genetic mutation of which
Cal is the victim, set the narrator's life in motion. Added furthermore
are the Second World War, the chronicle of the rise and fall of the
American automobile industry, the Detroit race riots of 1967, a
carefully constructed puzzle for archaeologists; a lively treatise on the
question whether the genes or the society determine the destiny of a
person; the report about the adventurous travel of a mutated gene
through the blood of three generations and its flourishing in a small
child, namely Cal, the hermaphroditic main character of the story, and
finally Cal's life itself, who at the end has become a diplomat in
Berlin, finally enjoying, after all the personal crises, the experiences
of the double gender. What integrates all these situations, social and
historic panoramas, the critical references and discussions and the
characters in Eugenides's but also in Wallace's and in Franzen's
books, is not a heroic story but rather a panorama of subtle
dependencies and outside controls that define the subject in the
contemporary world and that are the basis of the character's attempt
(and failure) at making sense. Again the book ends with a consoling
view on the main character's life.
The return of the character, however, causes certain problems,
given the crisis of the humanities. One of the crucial issues in the
humanities has been the status of the Subject. The central question is
whether the idea of the Subject, i.e., of a coherent self and a center of
consciousness, can be saved after Systems Theory has made it a
650 From Modernism to Postmodernism

differentiated illusion, a “formula”; after Hermeneutics has placed it


under the guardianship of interpretation, and the Critical Theory has
focused on intersubjectivity but left the individual and his or her
problems a blank spot (while Sartre, for instance, thematized the
solidarity with the subject in the moment of its fall); after indeed
Poststructuralism has turned the subject into the intersection of
values, of trends, and influences, after Language Theory and the
linguistic turn have made their own totalitarian claim, shutting in the
individual in what Wittgenstein called “language games” (though the
attraction of the linguistic turn has waned); and, finally, after the
biological sciences have enclosed the character within their
biological/scientific games? Psychology seems to resign itself to its
failure in the search of what has been called character. People appear
to define and distinguish themselves not by their character traits but
by the situations they find themselves in and by the way they perceive
and react to their situations.
Some novels follow such an indirect way of characterizing
their protagonists, designing situations that act as catalysts for the
understanding of the main characters, who define themselves through
extraordinary commitments to, even obsessions with something that
takes up all their attention and determines their life situations. It is as
if the fullness of the character can only be represented by the
absoluteness of its passion for that which fuses emotion and thought,
soul and intellect into an extraordinary whole and functions as a kind
of mirror or silent dialogue partner for the innermost core. This is for
instance the case in Coover’s Lucky Pierre, where Pierre is definable
only by his sexual organ and his indiscriminate fucking, or in Roth’s
American Pastoral, where Levrov’s daughter and ultimately he
himself are defined irrevocably by her horrifying terror act of killing
four people, or in Roth’s The Human Stain, where after many
disappointments the seventy year-old college professor finds
fulfillment in his love for a much younger, uneducated cleaning
woman. In Toni Morrison's novel Love the title defines the theme; it
is a book where love and hate delineate the coordinates of all that
happens. In Richard Powers's Plowing the Dark (2000), it is science
and technology that form the horizon of possibilities and
impossibilities for a group of virtual-reality researchers; in his The
Time of Our Singing (2003), music almost excessively determines the
lives of the two mixed-blood brothers and their parents. This
The Novel After Postmodernism 651

commitment to music expands and intensifies to an extent that the


characters, especially the lives of the two brothers, almost disappear
behind their strong passion for vocal music and the interpretations of
the music pieces they sing and play. In this kind of book, the character
is defined by both the exclusiveness of its commitment and the object
of its fascination, namely love, science/virtuality, art, war, etc. The
interaction between the character's commitment and its object creates
a theme. To become distinct, theme and character are here more than
ever dependant upon one another.
While the postmodern novel strove for aesthetic purity or
perfection and shunned the idea of “relevance”, the functions of art
and literature in post-postmodern times have become varied and
contradictory. Literature can be a place of openness and uncertainty
and disclose the deficits of the time,or it may be a place to which one
can flee with one's longings and anxieties. It may disrupt our
expectations and open up existential questions, or it may confirm the
familiar things that we expect and like. It may even be just something
that provides us with a pleasant Sunday afternoon. Combinations of
trends — of character novel and thriller, of analysis and
entertainment, of the existential and the comic approach — are the
order of the day. Stewart O'Nan's Halloween (2003) may serve as a
gaudy example of the combinatory scheme. One of the ingredients is
the Gothic horror novel, used in a playful spirit. The ghosts of the
dead speak to Tim, the sole survivor of a fatal car accident on
Halloween, and they function also as narrators, joking and making fun
among themseves. The horror novel is combined with the character
novel, with loss and grief, guilt and atonement, and traumatized
characters obsessed with memories of the crash and the senselessness
of death and survival. The book finally adds the thriller-motif of
repeating the outing and the grief, in a kind of showdown, in the (here
narrated) Halloween night a year later, with Tim rushing the car in the
repeated event with fatal inevitability towards another catastrophe, a
trip which O'Nan, however, ends with further surprises and only a
partial success of the past over the present.
652 From Modernism to Postmodernism

10.5. Telling Stories

Though the contemporary market for literature is divided and


varied, serving with different types of books a variety of often
contradictory interests, what connects all types of novels is the
penchant for storytelling. It may well be that the situational vividness
of storytelling, which the postmodern authors mostly shunned because
of its threatening one-dimensionality or which they multiplied into a
“baroque” tangle of plot lines (Barth), is now the contemporary means
of controlling the pressure of the indeterminate, the unstructurable
and ineffable. It seems that by confirming and giving expression to
the psychological insight that the individual self and its outer and
inner worlds are structured as stories, the novel in its various forms
can establish a common bond by narrative at a time in which the
simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous reigns and quite different and
mutually exclusive demands are raised. This penchant for storytelling
expresses a certain optimism of the authors, their belief in their ability
to cope with the uncertainties, the unknowable, and the frightening in
human existence, and to interpret what is there together with that
which is not there. The impression that a kind of realism with a
human face reenters fiction, for instance Franzen’s and Eugenides’s
bestsellers, is strengthened by the fact that many novels, with
exceptions such as Ellis's fiction, have conciliatory endings or at least
attenuate the negative potential by a comic perspective, by a revival
of sensibility, by a moral concern, or by an openness of the future,
whatever the final outcome may be, or at least activate the healing
spirit of narrative, which the most radical postmodern authors wanted
to evade or counterbalance.
Critics like Wolfgang Iser, Roland Barthes, or Keith Opdahl
have distinguished two radically different objectives in literature,
which of course interrelate, but not without establishing a dominance
relationship between the two. Iser’s and Opdahl’s distinctions
between the familiarizing and defamiliarizing tendencies in literature
are obviously relevant in our context. In his essay “The Interplay of
Creation and Interpretation”, Iser defines “creation” as a transgressive
mode; it aims at “an annihilation of our cherished securities, and it
tends to become scandalous the more entrenched our stabilities are”
(394). It thus tends to change, even destroy the reader's horizon of
expectations, as Iser argued in his reception theory. “Interpretation”,
The Novel After Postmodernism 653

however, “is basically a cognitive act designed to tackle something


non-cognitive or not-yet-cognized/cognizable” (389). The two acts
are interdependant. Opdahl uses similar distinctions. In his article
“The Nine Lives of of Literary Realism”, he differentiates between
two styles that “divide sharply on the means they use”. While some
writers “meet the challenge of their era by shocking the reader and
breaking expectation: others move even closer to the reader, learning
to match not only his world but the very process by which he
experiences and and imagines” (4). Opdahl makes it clear that
postmodern writers follow the defamiliarizing line and that realists
choose the familiarizing, the interpretative way, to use Iser's term, and
also that his sympathy lies with the goals of the realists, who “satisfy
many human needs, whether it be a celebration of nature or
perpetuation of our own likeness or attempt to solve human problems
by means of a model”; they furnish “an important element of
community, permitting large bodies of forbidden or unarticulated
experience to be shared publicly” (Opdahl 3. See also Claviez, Fluck,
Leypoldt).
It is obvious that in most cases, even those that flourish the
strategies of excess, the realists revive the familiarizing and
interpreting tendencies of fiction, striving to further knowledge, a
knowledge that includes an acquaintance with the gaps of knowledge,
the void, the unexplainable. But the gap and the void, the mysterious
and the grotesque in almost all cases do not destroy the ability to
know and interpret, and if, as in the case of the Swede in Roth’s The
American Pastoral, the protagonist falls victim to utter despondency
over his failing to understand the irreparable overthrow of his familiar
world, the narrator establishes a wider and balancing frame of
reference that makes the character’s despair understandable but also
personal. And there is almost always the network of cause and effect,
good and bad, the normal and the unnormal, which provide categories
of judgment, though, as we have argued, the awareness of uncertainty
is always made present by deconstructive strategies. The latter are
similar to those of the postmodern writers but scarcely ever attain the
absolute and universal meaning they usually have in postmodern
fiction, though there are important differences in the postmodern
camp too, as we have demonstrated in the earlier chapters of the book.
What the realist writer strives for is thus a balance of viewpoints and
judgments, while the postmodern writers often looked for the clash
654 From Modernism to Postmodernism

and opposition of perspectives, for the unsynthesizable paradox, and


for the provocation and definite break of the horizon of expectations.
And yet, there is also in postmodern fiction a search for balance, for
control of the gap and the void, which, however, takes quite a
different path: not the way of interpretation but, in Iser's term, that of
“creation”. The means of creation in the postmodern novel is irony
and expresses the subjective but absolute control of the author over
his material and modes of representation, both of which push against
or transgress the limits of expectation and of knowledge.
Ironic discourse is complex, even paradoxical. Its source is the
problematic relationship of the speaker to the object of his or her
speech. It plays with the discrepancy between them; it is not only
target-related but also self-reflexive. In its paradoxical state of double
polarity, irony creates a kind of anti-seriousness that is serious. It
holds and expresses the whole dimension of anthropological
knowledge and curiosity. Irony is a function of realism, as it negates
the unreal, clichéd reality; and it is a means of overcoming reality, as
it sets against it the power of the subject. It is a sharp tool of
awareness that, according to Friedrich Schlegel, “cannot be trifled
with by any means”. Its language contributes wit, an erotic conscious-
ness, a cosmopolitan interest, and frivolity. It contains the comic
perspective as one of its tools. There is also an irony of irony that
plays its game when the ironic style and the ironization of pathos are
not recognized by the recipient. Irony in the media society has as its
targets the false identification of art and reality, of language and the
real, of fictionality and truth, the familiar and the unknown, the self
and the other. In its deconstructive, literary form, irony almost always
has a constructive epistemological function. It becomes very serious
and sarcastic when it points from the well-known to the other, to
chaos and apocalypse, indeed to what Ionesco called the
“fundamental condition” of humanity, the “first” and “simple”, but
“forgotten” truths, like death and isolation, angst and “existential
uneasiness”, "the strangeness of the world”, calling everything into
question. Irony as attitude, as form, as language and rhetoric is one of
the foremost means of fulfilling this function. The question is whether
the slogan of the British group Pulp, “Irony is over. Bye, bye” is not
to be answered with a kind of meta-irony that ironizes the (call for
the) end of irony.
The Novel After Postmodernism 655

Irony is an achievement of knowledge, of narrative knowledge


that cannot be lost at this late stage of literary development. And the
post-postmodern novel has in fact developed its own kinds of irony,
which are not so obvious because they express themselves in
structure. and perspective, but have their own ways of subverting or
rather relativizing simple oppositions. The irony here works not so
much in the direction of gaining control over the inexplicable and
showing the author’s subject as the master of the discourse, though it
does that too; rather, it serves the goal of establishing a
countermedium against an all-too easy spirit of familiarization. The
contemporary storytelling scheme of the realists, for instance, tends to
define characters and themes in terms of the extraordinary but places
and contains them within the (ordinary) family circle, which then also
becomes extraordinary; though as a natural social group, the family
keeps its (healing) function as a lasting, even if broken-up, elementary
form of cohesion if not unity. The ordinary, the extraordinary, and the
organic/elemental here ironically reflect upon one another without
arranging simple syntheses. Furthermore, the narrative not only
creates the extraordinary beyond and within the ordinary and its
family spirit, but intersperses both the normal and the abnormal with
gaps, the void, the mysterious, and the atrocities of the grotesque,
which, as a result of their interaction with the normal and ordinary,
establish ironic relationships. The multimodal perspective of
knowledge under these circumstances acquires its own ironic
dimension. This does not fully change our assessment of the
achievement of the post-postmodern novel, but it explains why it only
rarely becomes sentimental and pathetic, the dominance of which
qualities makes some of the traditional realism of premodernist times
scarcely bearable any longer and against whose simple and uncalled-
for familiarization and emotional syntheses modern literature
rebelled.
This structuring post-postmodern irony also explains another
interesting phenomenon, namely why some of the most prominent
contemporary American authors, such as DeLillo, Franzen,
Eugenides, Wallace, lately also Powers, and many others have
attained a rare (ironic) achievement. As authors they have become
three figures in one — namely writers' writers, critics' writers and
audience's writers as well — a triangulation which points to the fact
that their novels obviously are able to satisfy quite different
656 From Modernism to Postmodernism

expectations and needs. The fact that they contain aestetic and
social/didactic values, as well as aesthetic and entertaining purposes,
obviously causes their popular success. This mix of standards makes
their fiction more flexible and broader in its appeal but also makes it
more difficult to develop criteria of quality. The American culture,
Don DeLillo once said, completely absorbes the literary author (an
absorption which the postmodern writer tried to prevent with all
available means), so that his or her voice does not differ from what he
calls the “general blabla”. In fact, parallel to the experts of business,
of the Near East, or of health and fitness, the writer, even the
prominent writer, increasingly seems to face the danger of becoming
an expert of telling stories in a readable, acceptable and useful, or
“relevant” manner that is able to hold its own in the market. It is also
the market of the media culture, which needs for its programs of
entertainment and instruction every striking and familiarizing story it
can get.
But the books of the mentioned authors are also the critics’
and the writers’ writers and are praised for their literary value. The
question, however, remains: what are now the criteria of literary
value? It seems that after the relativization of the modern and
postmodern purely aesthetic, formal criteria of quality, literary
criticism has not yet found a covincing aesthetic parameter of
evaluation that fits the new terms of narrative. Whether one likes it or
not, it seems now pertinent to go beyond the formal aesthetic criteria
and do justice to the mix of the aesthetic and the social, the
affirmative and the negative, and the multimodal perspective in post-
postmodern fiction, which makes the novels bestsellers. One should
also apply a mix of criteria that would give greater weight to the
social and the didactic elements of art, or rather, in Rorty’s terms,
raise the value of the novel for the introduction of the reader into the
complexities of life. This would not close but rather lessen the gap
between the popular and the critical view. It is interesting to note that
American literary criticism has often already gone this way,
unfortunately simplifying so much their arguments that they don’t
help much to delineate rational criteria of quality but rather prevent
them by avoiding clearly defined judgments and following the
authors’ line, praising their combinational talent, and the variety of
effects they see in the book. Richard Powers’s Plowing the Dark, for
instance, according to a review in Commonwealth, “has a surfeit of
The Novel After Postmodernism 657

intelligence, empathy, playful theory, serious philosophy, loving


literary allusions and wit”, which makes the book come “very close
to putting into practice a theory of everything a novel can achieve”.
The miracle of the American literary scene is that under these
confusing circumstances and the rivalry among aesthetic, cultural,
and economic standards, remarkable fiction is still being written, that
the important novels (of course with exceptions) are generally indeed
identified as such, and that there is by and large finally a consensus
of which they are.
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Notes
1
Sukenick says that there are “two ways of going about things: one is to
put everything in and the other is to leave everything out” (1975a, 42, quoting John
Ashbery). Referring to the exchange between Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, Elkin
says, “I’d rather be a putter-inner than a taker-outer” (LeClair and McCaffery 109).
2
Barth wrote recently: “I would refresh myself by writing an essay-lecture
or two, in order to discover what I thought about some subject or other, before [...]
laying the keel for the next substantial fiction project” (Barth 1995, ix).
3
See Kearney 1988, 261-65. I am indebted to Kearney’s discussion of the
postmodern imagination and to some extent follow him in this book.
4
Jameson writes about the postmodern videotext, but generalizes his
conclusions.
5
See Köhler; Bertens 1986; Best and Kellner 1991.
6
In the following account of the various positions on postmodernism, I
rely on Bertens’s excellent introduction to postmodernism, The Idea of the
Postmodern (l995), on the material that he makes available, and the ductus of his
argument, though for most of the evaluations I am responsible.
7
Baudrillard (who started to publish in the Sixties, but had a strong
impact on American theory only in the Eighties) and Jameson, influenced by
Baudrillard, connected the features of postmodernism, fragmentation, de-centerment,
pluralism, i.e., the deconstruction of the essentialist notions of truth, justice,
freedom, and reality, to cultural phenomena, and connected these cultural
phenomena with the state of consumer society and connected both with the state of
late capitalism, and all this under one explanatory scheme, the macro-theory of
Marxism (Jameson) or the hypothesis of radical sign control over reality
(Baudrillard). Both authors (and other deconstructionists) obviously overshot the
mark in their radical one-sidedness. These, in their totalizing, negative view of
postmodern society, stimulating theories were followed by more detailed studies of
the socio-economic features that were responsible for the transition from modernism
to postmodernism. They were not always more favorable to postmodern society but
made the picture more complex. An impressive example is David Harvey‘s The
Condition of Postmodernity (1989). He differentiates, in consensus with other
theorists, between a Fordist-Keynesian economic system of accumulation and profit
maximization that ruled the rather stable and prosperous postwar area until the
economic crisis of 1973, and, after its break-up, “a period of rapid change, flux, and
660 From Modernism to Postmodernism

uncertainty” (124), of “flexible accumulation”. It “is marked by a direct


confrontation with the rigidities of Fordism. It rests on flexibility with respect to
labour processes, labour markets, products, and patterns of consumption. It is
characterized by the emergence of entirely new sectors of production, new ways of
providing financial services, new markets, and, above all, greatly intensified rates of
commercial, technological, and organizational innovation” (147). The patterns of
consumption show a change from the “relatively stable aesthetic of a Fordist
modernism” to the postmodern unstable aesthetic that “celebrates difference,
ephemerality, spectacle, fashion, and the commodification of cultural forms”. Both
production and consumption patterns have been subject in the last decades to “an
intensive phase of time-space compression (a speeding up of time, a shrinkage of
distance, an annihilation of space) that has had a disorienting and disruptive impact
upon political-economic practices, the balance of class power, as well as upon
cultural and social life”(284). Under these circumstances, it is “hard to maintain any
firm sense of continuity”, one has “to face the challenge of accelerating turnover
time and the rapid write-off of traditional and historically acquired values”(291). In
spite of his impressively wide-ranging view, and a distinction between a good
postmodernism and a bad postmodernism (“a shameless accommodation with the
market”), Harvey’s verdict about the new flexibility more or less returns to
Jameson’s mono-causal (negative) view: “Postmodernism then signals nothing more
than a logical extension of the power of the market over the whole range of
production” (62).
One can set against this bleak outlook Bauman’s version, who, starting out
from the same premise, namely that the economic determines the social, from the
standpoint of a postmodern sociology (without the classical models of capitalism,
industrialism, rationalization and progress) comes to quite different conclusions,
namely that postmodernity is a “modernity emancipated from false consciousness”,
“a re-enchantment of the world that modernity had tried hard to dis-enchant”, a
condition that restores “the fullness of moral choice and responsibility” and offers
the chance of “self-assembly” in the “habitats” of postmodern culture (Bauman 188,
x, xxii, 191).
Harvey’s inability or unwillingness to see much good in the new flexibility
signal the difficulties that are involved in facing the chances instead of the dangers
of this flexibility, which is also a new openness. This openness is a problem because
it cannot easily be explained, systematized or controlled; it has, in spite of all
similarities, different consequences in the various sectors of society, each of which,
as Weber and Habermas and others have noted, develops its own “rationality
complex” (Habermas). This means that even if this flexibility and openness has a
negative function in the consumption of commodities, which may or may not be the
case, a new sensibility may grow in postmodern culture that furthers a new tolerance
of the other, and a politics may come to pass that improves a new sense for
democracy. The main reason, however, for the uncertainty that the new flexibility
and openness create is the problem of legitimation, the legitimation for difference or
sameness as value standard, for a moral and political basis for action. The lack of
such a legitimation makes it impossible to mediate among the claims of, first,
multiplicity and simultaneity, second, enlightenment project and progress, third,
universality and wholeness, after the loss or, rather, abandonment of indubitable
essentialist truths. Every attempt to answer the crucial questions, the questions about
Notes 661

what is the role of freedom, responsibility, and identity, or of the whole and the part,
faces a situation “filled with unsettling contrariety” (Soja 187), with antinomies and
paradoxes that cannot be resolved and have to be endured.
Feminism is a good example. In Bertens’s words: “Like the post-Marxists,
postmodern feminists find themselves in the position of wishing to preserve
Enlightenment ideals, such as freedom and equality, while simultaneously rejecting
the universalist assumptions that gave these ideas their original legitimation” (1995,
205). Furthermore, postmodern fragmentation fragments also the feminist agenda.
While it first started out with the identity of the white middle-class woman and an
essentialist concept of gender, in the process women of color, of different class and
various ethnic backgrounds discovered their own difference and de-essentialized and
split the cultural and political feminist agenda by adding the social context and the
horizon of the group to gender as defining principles. The loss of grand theories
characterizes large parts of contemporary feminism. In the words of Fraser and
Nicholson: “If postmodern-feminist critique must remain ‘theoretical,’ not just any
kind of theory will do. Rather, theory here would be explicitly historical, attuned to
the cultural specificity of different societies and periods and to that of different
groups within societies and periods [...] Moreover, post-modern feminist theory
would be nonuniversalist. When its focus became cross-cultural or trans-epochal its
mode of attention would be comparativist rather than universalist, attuned to changes
and contrasts instead of ‘covering laws’ [...] It would replace unitary notions of
‘woman’ and ‘feminine gender identity’ with plural and complexly constructed
conceptions of social identity, treating gender as one relevant strand among others,
attending also to class, race, ethnicity, age, land, sexual orientation” (101).
The result of this multiplication of difference is of course conflict, a
conflict of legitimate interests that cannot fall back on a legitimate hierarchy of
values for solving that conflict. The result of this paralyzing situation is the recourse
to Habermas‘s communication rationality or Apel’s “discourse ethics”, which are
meant to bring about a consensus or, which is more probable, a relapse into power
games. We are thus faced with the central paradox that the increase of difference and
democracy does not solve problems, only increases the scenes of struggle and action,
which, however, paradoxically is an improvement because the “localization” of the
conflict, first, favors Lyotard‘s “little narratives” at the expense of the “grand
narratives” of emancipation and thus opposes the debilitating effect of totality, and,
second, in the sense of the deconstructionists, favors the idea of vitalizing struggle
and conflict over deadening consensus. Yet problems remain, and these problems are
at least threefold. First, the local area ethics can expand into overall ideological
positions. Second, all movements for more justice have to choose or negotiate
between the moral standards of equality/sameness and otherness/difference. And,
third, the mechanisms of power, as Foucault explained, tend to make themselves
independent from the subjects that exercise them, become impersonal, establish
necessities, and lead to a point where the ethics of freedom can only be explained in
terms of resistance against the coercions of power. To sum up this more systematic
and associational than chronological, and by no means complete, listing:
“Postmodernism is a contradictory phenomenon, one that uses and abuses, installs
and then subverts, the very concepts it challenges” (Hutcheon 1988, 3). All this
makes postmodernism a rather unstable concept but also enables it to react to the
change of the times, to keep as it were at the edge of developments, to encompass an
662 From Modernism to Postmodernism

ever widening complex of characteristics up to the point where its aptitude to answer
to and designate the needs and drives of the time no longer suffices.
8
The “system-environment differentiation” is Niklas Luhmann’s term (see
1987, 315; and 1984).
9
For an overview see Scruton.
10
In the Introduction to his Philosophy of Fine Art, Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel speaks of art as an unending human enterprise, “to complete which
the history of the world will need its evolution of centuries” (122). But then he also
notes that art is a “thing of the past”, for “the present time is not [...] favorable to art”
(13), the “present time” being a reflective culture.
11
See Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who, as Matthew Arnold after him and
many of their followers, distinguishes between civilization (“a mixed good, if not far
more a corrupting influence”) and culture or “cultivation” (“the harmonious
development of those qualities and faculties which characterize our humanity”)
(1972, 33).
12
Arguing along these lines, Susan Sontag announced a postmodern
“new” and “unitary”, i.e., multi-dimensional, noncentered sensibility, a theory of
uncritical art that does not combine aesthetic and ethical views, but rests on an
“uncompromisingly aesthetic experience of the world”. Instead of “criticism of
life” (Matthew Arnold’s definition of art), art should serve the sensual “expansion of
life”; she thus spoke of the “erotics” of art, just as Roland Barthes spoke of the
“erotics” of reading (1975). Joseph Margolis has claimed that “aesthetics is the most
strategically placed philosophic discipline of our time” (1980, 77).
13
See Nemoianu; Richard Brown; Wechsler; White 1978; Carroll 1987.
14
The opinions, however, vary because the concepts of aesthetics vary.
While Megill emphasizes the aestheticism of the poststructuralists, David Carroll
stresses the critical rather than the aesthetic aspect in the role assigned to art and
literature by the poststructuralist philosophers (1987, passim). Stuart Sim argues, in
a more traditional understanding of aesthetics, that the writings of Derrida and
Lyotard contain an “anti-aesthetic [...] intent”, aim at “the creation of a post-aesthetic
realm beyond the reach of value judgment” (1).
15
See also Dickie 1974. For the counter-view that an aesthetic attitude or
consciousness is necessary for the appreciation of art, see M.C. Beardsley and E.
Bullough. For the view that the basic criterion of art status is the author’s intention,
see T. Binkley: “To be a piece of art, an item need only be indexed as an artwork by
an artist” (37). See also for another variant W.E. Kennick: “If anyone is able to use
the word ‘art’ concretely [...] he knows ‘what art is’” (321). Morris Weitz maintains
that “the very expansive, adventurous character of art, its ever-present changes and
novel creations, make it logically impossible to ensure any set of defining
properties” (“The Role of Theory in Aesthetics” 127).
Notes 663

16
Speaking of the Object-Theoreticians, Holland refers to “people like W.
R. D. Fairbairn, Harry Guntrip, Marion Milner or D. W. Winnicott” (301).
17
Chambers uses the term situation only metaphorically. He intends to
undertake “relatively formal and entirely text-based studies of the apparatus — the
discursive dispositifs — by which [...] texts designate themselves as contractual
phenomena” (9). Looking for “textual indices” that serve to identify the text’s
“narrative situation”, he negates the difference between the outside and the inside,
text and world.
18
See also Iser 1993,155-64.
19
Lacan, for instance, holds “that only the correlations between signifier
and signifier supply the standard for all research into meaning”, and that, since the
unconscious works with signs and symbols, “what the psychoanalytic experience
discovers in the unconscious is the whole structure of language” (1988, 110, 103).
20
See also Reid, who advocates the employment of frame-theory because
“the perceptions of coherence” (9) are the result from “particular framings” (13) in
the communication process and interchange between text and reader, which is a
constant struggle between possessing and dispossessing meaning.
21
I am indebted to his essay for the discussion of scripts.
22
For an overview of the discussion of form and force, see Gibson 32-68.
23
Derrida in “Force and Signification” uses the force-concept in order to
turn against the “regulation and schematization” in “essentialism or teleological
structuralism”, “the metaphysics is implicit in all structuralism” (1978, 24). In
contrast, force “gives signified meaning no respite, no rest, but engages it in its own
economy so that it always signifies again and differs” (25), and “resists geometrical
metaphorization” (20).
24
See Virilio 1988 and 1991. Docherty in his essay on “The Ethics of
Alterity” (1996) uses the same terms — “appearance versus disappearance” — in
order to differentiate the paradigm of the postmodern novel from that of the
traditional and modern novel (“appearance versus reality”).
25
See Poster 1988, 7-8; Connor 60; Norris 1990, 172; Best and Kellner
125; and last, but not least, Bertens 1995, 146-159, to whose critical assessment I am
indebted.
26
Gibson’s book is the most recent and most interesting attempt to de-
construct and overcome what he calls the “fantasy of a geometrical clarity,
symmetry and proportion to narrative or the narrative text” (8), which is promoted
by a “narratological geometry or technology of narrative” that “universalise and
essentialise the structural phenomena supposedly uncovered” and have their “roots
664 From Modernism to Postmodernism

in structuralism” (5). In a turn away “from laws and regularities”, he adopts a model
of exchanges and interferences, connections and disconnections, between and within
“pluralized spaces”. As the title notes, he aims at “a postmodern theory of
narrative”, which, however, gets entangled in the general rejection of all
classifications, categories, and textual invariants, and falls short of establishing a
specific postmodern aesthetic by an unspecified “pluralisation of the narratological
imaginary”, (15) the “notion of narrative parcours” as “movement through multiple
spaces” (16) that invalidates “explicatory grids” (Serres), and, in general, he replaces
them with ideas like “force, hymen, inauguration, event, monstrosity, laterality,
writing” (25), following a strategy that is “nomadic” (25). The usefulness of the
book for our purpose, however, is limited by the facts that it does not say what kind
of postmodern narrative he has in mind and that none of the established postmodern
texts are referred to, much less analyzed, with the exception of Robbe-Grillet. Yet I
am indebted to Gibson’s lucid and competent overview over the development of
narratology, and especially to his analysis of the postmodern ideas of time, event,
and monstrosity.
27
Hawkes said in an interview: “My novels are not highly plotted, but
certainly they’re elaborately structured. I began to write fiction on the assumption
that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting, and theme, and
having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of
vision or structure was really all that remained. And structure — verbal and
psychological coherence — is still my largest concern as a writer. Related or
corresponding event, recurring image and recurring action, these constitute the
essential substance or meaningful density of my writing” (Dembo and Pondrom 11).
28
The thematic structure has been made a special field for analysis by,
among others, Levin and Falk. See for an overview Sollors. The evaluation of the
thematic approach has radically changed as a result of the power of force in
postmodern narrative practice and poststructuralist theory, which rejects the
suggestion of centrality and binarism that is almost inevitably inherent in the
abstractions of thematization, even the “modest” ones. According to Derrida, “the
open and productive displacement of the textual chain”, the producing of “a
nonfinite number of semantic effects”, and the “irreducible and generative
multiplicity” of the text, the “dissemination” of meaning, in fact “fracture the limit
of the text, forbidding an exhaustive and closed formalization of it, or at least a
saturating taxonomy of its themes, its signified, its meaning” (1981, 45).
29
This seems to justify statements like Robert Scholes’s that “inter-
pretation proper” is the “thematizing [of] a fictional text”, which leads to the
establishment of the “binary oppositions that interpretation seeks to reveal as the
axes of value in a text”, with “the singular oppositions of the text” then leading to
“the generalized oppositions that structure our cultural systems of values” (1985, 29,
53, 33). Being disinclined to “the kind of binary reasoning underlying much
thematic criticism”, one can also be more modest, “drawing a circle around the
thematic functions of characters”, and seeing thematic assertions as rising gradually
from “the temporal process”, (Phelan 217, 61, 75) from the dynamic interplay of
many particulars, and thus avoiding “thematization” as a totalizing approach.
Notes 665

30
Symbolic signification in literature is to be distinguished from the
general signifying activity of perception and apperception, which is intentional
(Brentano 124-25), defined by the meaning-giving acts of consciousness (Husserl
1928, 372; 1980a) and by the operational structure of the mind (Piaget 1967, 3-5,
124-25). The intentional act of the mind has been seen by Cassirer, Whitehead, and
Susan Langer as a “symbolic”, i.e., representing act (Cassirer 1953-57; Whitehead
1985). The literary symbol moreover is to be differentiated from the linguistic sign
that Peirce and Jakobson called a symbol. The linguistic sign is the medium of all
literary signifying, but the literary symbol refers to a secondary level of
interpretation. In this, of course, it is not different from the general interpretative
function of art, which has been considered symbolic in general terms. The literary
symbol as a separate isolatable entity, however, serves a specific function within the
overall symbolic pattern of the text by referring, in concrete terms and in a specific
way, from something particular to something more general. A further problem is the
naming of this specific interpretative reference. Symbol, allegory, and even myth are
terms often used without distinction. As Philip Rahv noticed early on, there is a
disillusionary confusion of terms: “The younger critics have taken to using all three
terms [mythic, symbolic, allegoric] almost interchangeably and always with an air of
offering an irrefutable proof of sensibility, with the result that they have been nearly
emptied of specific meaning and turned into little more than pretentious counters of
approbation” (281). See, for instance, Northrop Frye’s differing, disparate use of the
term myth and the equating of myth and symbol for the figurative use of “image” in
the sense of symbol. This has not changed much except that after the “linguistic
turn” the term metaphor has been added (of which more later).
31
The literary symbol calls for some further interpretation. We will stick
to the term, though in some recent discourses allegory has been substituted for
symbol. The fact that the process of embodying figurative meaning in the corporeal
entities of a fictive world is arbitrary and willful, manipulated by the writer or
character and not restricted to the representation of meaning inherent, for instance, in
nature, has led in some commentaries to a preference for the term “allegory” over
the term “symbol”, which is supposedly “organic” in character. The symbol
allegedly implicates a pre-established, integrative, atemporal and universal
relationship between “vehicle” and “tenor”, sign and referent, the material and the
spiritual modes of being, thus referring, in the wake of romanticism, to a “natural”,
preformed interrelation of surface and depth, of existence and essence, while
according to the deconstructionist stance of postmodern theoreticians and writers
there is no antecedent reality and meaning since language is the limit, so that the
symbol is a linguistic construct of the mind without referent outside language.
According to Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of Baroque allegory in his
The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, allegory is supposed to mark not the
presence of an essence in existence as the symbol is supposed to do but, on the
contrary, the absence of transcendent meaning, together with the presence of the
existential desire to constitute existence into essence, which is not present in the
given. According to Benjamin, in allegorical thinking, “the image is only a
signature, only the monogram of essence, not the essence itself in a mask” (1977b,
214). Thus allegory is considered not only a rhetorical technique but an experience
666 From Modernism to Postmodernism

as well, the experience of the absence of and the reaching out for an ultimate
referent, though there is a discontinuous relationship between the material signifier
and the spiritual signified. Paul DeMan in his Allegories of Reading, maintains that
“[a]llegorical narratives tell the story of the failure to read whereas tropological
narratives [...] tell the story of the failure to denominate. The difference is only a
difference of degree and the allegory does not erase the figure. Allegories are always
allegories of metaphor and, as such, they are always allegories of the impossibility of
reading” (205).
Yet the above-mentioned narrowing of the symbol to the expression of
metaphysical meaning is as willful and arbitrary as making allegory the expression
of the lack of that meaning and the desire for it. Though romanticism proceeds from
the assumption that something higher, an ideal or an idea, can manifest itself in
nature and the world, in the sense of Carlyle’s dictum: “In the Symbol proper [...]
there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation
of the Infinite” (Sar 165), the symbol reveals also finite meaning. The metaphysical
way of symbolic thinking is a result of the Medieval Christian worldview, the
concept of the “Chain of Being”, with its gradated hierarchy of positions between
the material world and God, and the analogies between the physical, the moral, and
the spiritual. This kind of symbolic attitude has been “secularized” by denoting and
connoting in the symbol not only “vertical” meaning, depth under the surface, spirit
above the earth, in short, the ultimate in the relative, but also by providing reference
“horizontally”. Symbolic figuration accumulates in the narrative process and
connects the milieu with the character, space with time, the house with history.
Under the aspect of function, the symbol “works both from the individual toward the
universal and from the object of less interest to the object of greater interest, from
the artificial to the natural, from the outer to the inner, from the physical to the
psychological, the spiritual, and the transcendent” (Wimsatt 13). Using the term
“symbol”, it is much easier to compare the strategies of modern with those of
postmodern fiction.
32
Kristeva 1984, 25-26, passim; in part, she sees the privileged nature of
literature in the fact that its “essential element” is the interrelation and interaction of
semiotic activity and symbolic formations.
33
For these terms of differentiation, see R. M. Brown.
34
In the “Introduction” to Philosophie in Literatur, the editors Schild-
knecht and Teichert differentiate between the first three relationships here proposed.
I am indebted to their classification. See also Griffiths; Cascardi 1987.
35
See also Earl’s approach to Gravity’s Rainbow as a “philosophical
novel”. He uses the ideas of Norman O. Brown, Lévi-Strauss, Husserl and
Heidegger as “commentary on Pynchon’s theme”.

36
See W. McConnell; Berressem 206; Foucault’s “The Eye of Power”
(who “sees power as an anonymous ‘technology’ [cf. Nietzsche] [...] a global
network of infinitely complex and ramose power relations into which the subject is
Notes 667

inscribed” [1980, 151]) presides for long stretches over the poetics of Gravity’s
Rainbow.
37
Such passages range in length from short references (“In the end one
experiences only oneself, Nietzsche said”, in “A Shower of Gold” [SSt 17]), to
statements “Like Pascal said: ‘The natural misfortune of our mortal and feeble
condition is so wretched that when we consider it closely, nothing can console us’”
(“A Shower of Gold” [18]), to a quote from Husserl, “[b]ut you have not grasped the
tiring reality, the essence!” the narrator sadly adding, “Nor will I, ever”. (“Florence
Green is 81” [ ]), to a paragraph-long parody on Heidegger’s concept of Being
(“Nothing: A Preliminary Account” [SSt 247]), to finally an even lengthier treatise
on the subject of irony in “Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel” (CL 81-93).
38
Important contributions to a definition of meta-fiction are reprinted in
this volume.
39
Heidegger, however, is ambivalent on this point.
40
Plater devotes a whole chapter to Wittgenstein’s influence on Pynchon,
without being always convincing in his far-reaching conclusions.
41
See for an overview the chapter “Modernism, Existentialism, Post-
modernism: The 1970s” in Bertens 1995. I am indebted to his argument.
42
Art’s claim to establishing its own rules and forming a stable structure
of continuity and coherence, of a meaning-giving whole in the face of an instable
and discontinuous, incoherent and meaningless world was confronted with two
problems: the stereotyping of its own innovative forms and the loss of contact with
life. Both dangers led to consequences that broke up the unity of the modern
movement. The ideology of the new compelled the artist to create ever novel formal
syntheses, an effort that finally defeated itself and ultimately worked towards the
incorporation of the non-aesthetic into the aesthetic. The experiments of what one
might call the progressive avantgarde broke away from the totalizing ideology of
most of the “classical” modernists, extended the borderlines of the art system
towards the untried and unknown, gave up on the concept of organic form, and
blurred the boundaries between art and the social environment (Bürger).
Dadaism is the best example of the crucial tensions within modern art. But
modernism as an art movement itself had to follow the law of entropy. By going all
the way towards rejecting society and its clichés of perception, thought, and values,
by de-contextualizing and de-conceptualizing the text, art must continuously disrupt
anew “older” aesthetics and its values, and finally turn against itself, rejecting and
breaking up the tenets and practices of the aesthetics of essence and structural
totality in its search for both newness and relevance. This point is finally reached in
postmodernism. In this dialectical process of establishing and breaking up wholeness
which remains without synthesis, the anti-aesthetic within art paradoxically seizes
the subversive function of the aesthetic after the aesthetic has lost its spirit of
deconstruction and has isolated itself in its hermetics of form. The contradictions in
the program of modern art are thus obvious.
668 From Modernism to Postmodernism

Modernism, on the one hand, gives dominance to the universally true and
the stability of a clearly bounded form, and aims at the integration of all parts into an
objective, totalizing, meaning-giving whole. On the other, it focuses on the particular
and the concrete, gives expression to (decentering) subjectivity, reveals and exhibits
the transitoriness and elusiveness of experience and knowledge, and invades the
unknowable (though the latter can by no means be represented by any kind of
wholeness, which in one way or another also means closure). The simultaneous
effort to attain closure and openness, of course, is an impossibility. Postmodernism
has exposed the discrepancy in modern aesthetic ideology, which is the
encapsulation of the unbounded within the discipline of form. It has given up the
attempt to attain (organic) totality in theme and form and has resigned itself to
partiality and unending fluidity, to a paradoxical transformation of form into formed
unform that in its radical openness modernism would have considered anti-aesthetic.
43
It is interesting that the aesthetics of the environment also develop in a
paradoxical manner. The overall functions of environmental aesthetics incorporated,
for instance, in museum culture, decoration, and formulaic fiction, are manifold; this
aesthetic wavers between cognition and entertainment, emphasizing the latter, but
hardly ever excluding the former. Both cognition and entertainment combine to
avoid entropy in a society that has more and more leisure, where entropy equates to
boredom. Boredom results from the loss of variety, surprise, struggle, and emotional
intensity, from the confrontation with stale repetition and sameness. It goes hand in
hand with the standardization of the environment. The struggle against boredom
reveals the central paradox of the aesthetics of the environment: the ineluctable
interrelation of sameness and difference, seeming and being. It is a paradoxical fact
that the aesthetics of the environment, i.e., decoration, museum artifacts, popular
literature, film and TV series, aim at the production of difference, suspense, and
intensity, while at the same time they recur to the sameness of formulaic designs.
Even more paradoxical (and mostly neglected in reception aesthetics) is the fact that
this sameness of the formula is still able to produce concrete situations of difference,
suspense, and intensity.
44
Todorov notes: “The concept of the fantastic is therefore to be defined
in relation to those of the real and the imaginary” (1975, 25). See also Caillois 1987:
“Le fantastique suppose la solidité du monde réel, mais pour mieux le ravager” (17).
Rabkin characterizes ‘fantasy’ as the “polar opposite [to] Reality” (227).
45
None of the books on the Fantastic really defines the basic terms, i.e.
reality, imagination, play, fantasy in contrast to the fantastic as category, subversion
contra expansion, etc.; there is no commonly accepted definition of the fantastic.
Each author hedges his or her specific unspecified terms. Swinfen holds that “[t]he
essential ingredient of all fantasy is ‘the marvellous,’ which will be regarded as
anything outside the normal space-time continuum of the everyday world” (5);
Attebery circumvents the whole issue of the fantastic and defines his approach with
the following question: “How did the author move his story out of the everyday
world into the realm of the marvelous?” (viii). Irwin considers as fantastic “a story
based on and controlled by an overt violation of what is generally accepted as
possibility” (4); Manlove says that the fantastic contains a substantial and irreducible
Notes 669

element of “supernatural or impossible worlds, beings, or objects” (3); Rabkin thinks


that “[t]he truly fantastic occurs when the ground rules of the narrative are forced to
make a 180° reversal, when prevailing perspectives are directly contradicted” (12).
But in Kafka and postmodern texts, the ground rules are not reversed; on the
contrary they continue from beginning to end in terms of radical strangeness that in
postmodern narrative is not a sign of alienation but of expansion of possibilities.
Hume means by fantasy the deliberate departure from the limits of what is usually
accepted as real and “normal” (K. Hume xii); Brooke-Rose concerns herself
primarily with questions of “rhetoric”. Her chapter on the postmodern novel,
“Metafiction and Surfiction”, chiefly analyzes “parody” and “stylization” (1981).
See also Jackson; Schlobin; and the volumes on the state of the Fantastic, containing
selected essays from the fourteen International Conferences on the Fantastic, 1978-
1994, published 1980-1995 by Greenwood Press, Westport, CO (Coyle; Langford;
Morse, Tymn and Bertha; Ruddick).
46
Critics arrive at genre definitions by cataloguing such characteristic
motifs as “pacts with the devil, ... a soul in distress, ... the ghost, the appearance of
personified death among the living, ... the undefinable, invisible ‘thing’, ... vampires,
the statue, the doll, the suits of armor or the automation that suddenly come to life”
(Caillois 1974, 63-65; see also Gradmann 132-33). Other theorists insist that
fantastic literature must arouse fear, but fear varies according to the expectations and
predispositions of the recipient (see Lovecraft 101); see also: Caillois 1965; H.
Conrad). Attempts have been made at defining the fantastic by means of opposition
to some posited extra-linguistic “reality” (Caillois 1965; Jaquemin, “Über das
Phantastische in der Literatur;” Gradmann 8), though the “reality” status of the
fictional world can only be defined by the text itself. Post-Freudian,
psychoanalytically oriented criticism frequently simplifies the phenomenon of the
fantastic by taking it one-dimensionally as a compensation for too much rationality
or for a guilt complex or as a violation of taboos — this almost always fails to
account for any specifically literary dimension (Penzoldt xii; Vax; Caillois 1987, 30;
Kittler). Sociological modes of argumentation often merely deplore the alleged
escapism and lack of social relevance of fantastic literature and attack it for its
“reactionary moral attitude” and for representing the human being as determined by
unfathomable external forces (Gustafsson, “Über das Phantastische in der Literatur”
(1970); Baier; E. Wilson).
47
Caillois notes: “The fantastic is always a break in the acknowledged
order, an irruption of the inadmissible within the changeless everyday legality”
(1965); Castex writes: “The fantastic [...] is characterized [...] by a brutal intrusion of
mystery into the context of real life”; Vax, in L’art et la littérature fantastique: “The
fantastic narrative generally describes men like ourselves, inhabiting the real world,
suddenly confronted by the inexplicable” (all quotations in Todorov 1975, 26).
48
A critical discussion of Todorov’s model of the fantastic is to be found
in Brooke- Rose 1981, 55-71. Jackson rephrases Todorov’s model, suggesting a
fantastic mode rather than a genre; she understands fantasy as a mode of discourse.
At one pole of the scale is the marvellous, at the other the mimetic (Todorov’s
uncanny), between which the fantastic with varying relations of dominance is
670 From Modernism to Postmodernism

situated (33-37). She extends Todorov’s “poetics of the fantastic into one aware of
the politics of its forms” (6), and makes reference to psychoanalytic readings of
texts. As to the mimetic role of her model, even in her reference to postmodern texts,
for instance those of Pynchon, it is still defined by the assumption that the world is
coherent, structured, and accessible to human understanding, and leaves out of
consideration the blurring of the borderlines in postmodern fiction. L. Olsen follows
Jackson, noting that “fantasy is that stutter between two modes of discourse which
generates textual instability, an ellipse of uncertainty” (19), an approach rather
undifferentiated for the analysis of postmodern fiction. The choice of texts is
furthermore rather arbitrary. Without explanation the book refers to Kafka, Borges,
Robbe-Grillet, Beckett, Fuentes, Pynchon, García Márquez, and Coetzee.
49
Sartre’s philosophical distinction between the thetic and the non-thetic
can be helpful for defining the structure of the fantastic. The thetic denotes
propositions taken to be rational, real, essential, while the non-thetic refers to their
opposites, which are unreal and can have no adequate form and linguistic expression
(Bessière). Gombrich’s concept of schema and correction (of order) is still nearer to
the structure of the fantastic in the text. If the schema fulfills our need for form, for a
“basic scaffolding” “with which to grasp the infinite variety of this world of change”
and demonstrates the “tendency of our minds to classify and register our experiences
in terms of the known” (24, 99; see also Iser 1978, 227) in an effort to reduce the
contingency of the world, then the discovery that the ordering schemata cannot
handle the growing complexity of the world, as well as the force of desire and
change must lead to a correction that can range from a violation of norms to their
total invalidation. The fantastic always served this function of correcting the schema,
of rejecting the stabilized and stereotyped old for something other and new. Since
the deformations of the schema presuppose the presence of the schema, which can be
pushed into the background or relegated to the response of the reader but never
abolished, there is always a background-foreground relationship between the
fantastic, which violates the schema, and the schema itself and its ordering impetus
that establishes it. The relationship is variable in the sense that what is background
can become foreground and vice versa. This process may repeat itself, reversing,
contradicting and complicating the picture of the world in what Arnheim has called a
“mutual bombardment”, in this case of order and disorder or form and force (226). In
this process the fantastic marks the deficiencies of the schema, its weak points, and
can contribute, in Freud’s words, to a “cognizance of what has been displaced”
(1968b, 15).
50
Sukenick refers to Roth’s statement and adds to it his own version: “In a
curious turnabout, writers in the seventies [...] have learned to profit from what is by
definition an impossible situation. If everything is impossible, then anything
becomes possible. What we have now is a fiction of the impossible that thrives on its
own impossibility, which is no more nor less impossible these days than, say, city
life, politics, or peace between the sexes. To paraphrase Beckett, it can’t go on it
must go on it goes on” (1975a, 8).
51
Freud 1953 and 1968a, passim.
Notes 671

52
The argument here follows that of Metzner, though the conclusions are
my own.
53
Bakhtin sees a subversive function, a “dialogical” structure (ques-
tioning, simple or unitary ways of observing the world) in the fantastic mode of such
authors as E.T.A. Hoffmann, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Poe, Jean Paul, and relates these
traits to Menippean satire. The latter’s characteristics are “violations of the generally
accepted, ordinary course of event and of the established norms of behaviour and
etiquette” (96). “The fantastic serves here not in the positive embodiment of the
truth, but in the search after the truth, its provocation, and, most importantly, its
testing” (94).
54
Magic realism has been considered, on the one hand, a literary mode, a
form of the fantastic in extension of European paradigms, for instance Kafka, under
the influence of the French surrealists, a development that announces the arrival of
Latin American Literature as innovative fiction in the international canon (Flores).
Against this obviously restricted interpretation later versions have conceptualized
magic realism as an “attitude” towards reality that focuses on the “discovery of the
mysterious relationship between man and his circumstances” (Leal 122), in
opposition to the paradigms of universal reason that would limit and impoverish
human perception and understanding. While Flores sees an advantage in working
strictly in terms of the fantastic, Leal, whose interest is more epistemological than
aesthetic, starts out with a much too narrow concept of the fantastic and, contrary to
Flores, maintains that “magical realism cannot be identified either with fantastic
literature or with psychological literature, or with the surrealist or hermetic literature
that Ortega describes”. Magical realism “does not need to justify the mystery of
events, as the fantastic writer has to. In fantastic literature the supernatural invades a
world ruled by reason” (Leal 121, 123).
55
See, for instance, Alejo Carpentier, who opposes European models
though he is heavily influenced by European surrealism and admits it. He turns
against this European “school” of surrealism by calling it much too literary (see
1995a and 1995b).
56
Writers of magic realism give the impression that they have corrected
the limitations of the realistic novel and created the adequate literary form for the
representation of the really real in the Latin American condition and the history of
the Continent. Out of this dilemma has risen the feeling with some of the critics that
“there is undoubtedly something unsatisfactory about the strategy of magic realism
[...]. Supplementation (magic, in this instance) only adds another layer to the
significative deception. The thing itself always slips away” (Simpkins 154, see also
Jameson 1975b, 142). This dilemma explains that Borges and Márquez both have
gone beyond this notion of magic realism as a magic supplementation of realism,
stressing the non-referential, making in fact the problem of representation a focal
point of the text, which indeed One Hundred Years of Solitude does in its play with
the problem of textuality. Both writers became disillusioned with the “tricks” and
subjects of magic realism. Borges said “that I feel as if I were a kind of high fidelity,
a kind of gadget, no? A kind of factory producing stories about mistaken identity,
672 From Modernism to Postmodernism

about mazes, about tigers, about mirrors”; and Márquez devalued — in comparison
with his The Autumn of the Patriarch — the success of One Hundred Years of
Solitude “since I knew it was written with all the tricks and artifices under the sun, I
knew I could do better even before I wrote it” (see Simpkins 155-56 for the
quotation of the full text).
57
See for even more names Faris. See also Todd.
58
D’Haen cites Hutcheon 1988 and McHale as examples.
59
Bloom has offered a formula that indicates this plurisignification of the
fantastic, which a narrowly psychoanalytic interpretation often denies: “fantasy, as a
belated version of romance, promises an absolute freedom from belatedness, from
the anxieties of literary influence and origination, yet this promise is shadowed
always by a psychic over-determination in the form itself of fantasy, that puts the
stance of freedom into severe question. What promises to be the least anxious of
literary modes becomes much the most anxious” (6, Bloom’s italics).
60
Kennard’s distinction between two types of fantasy, number and night-
mare, exemplifies how limited the definitions of the fantastic in postmodern fiction
are. Number (Heller, Barth, Vonnegut) is dehumanist in orientation; it is “anti-
literature, anti-myth, destructive of form”, and it “takes the reader systematically and
logically towards nothing, towards the void, by breaking down one by one his
expectations of realism”. Nightmare on the contrary is humanist in orientation; it is
“basically a constructionist form”, and it moves “the reader towards a recognition of
an all-inclusive world, a puzzle in which the pieces fit together [...] towards infinity
where there is mystery rather than the void” (12-14). In fact, the tension between
what he calls number and nightmare is characteristic of the postmodern fantastic.
Generally, the definitions of the fantastic are either too vague to be heuristically
helpful or they are too rigorously separative. The central feature of the postmodern
fantastic is its radical ambivalence, the paradoxical interface of contradictory
possibilities.
61
Abstraction of course is not an entirely new phenomenon. According to
David Hume’s well-known differentiation, modern art moves from the “vital”, the
closely bound- up-with-nature, towards the “geometrical” with its “tendency to
abstraction” and “its feeling of separation in the face of outside nature” (cf. 1967).
Georg Lukács in his Theory of the Novel — both following and expanding on Hegel
— called the totality of the novel abstract, contrary to that of the epic, and described
its dangers: “In a novel, totality can be systematized only in abstract terms, which is
why [...] the only possible form of a rounded totality — had to be one of abstract
concepts [...]. Such abstract systematization is, it is true, the ultimate basis of the
entire structure, but in the created reality of the novel all that becomes visible is the
distance separating the systematization from concrete life: a systematization which
emphasizes the conventionality of the objective world and the interiority of the
subjective one. Thus the elements of the novel are, in the Hegelian sense, entirely
abstract; abstract, the nostalgia of the characters for utopian perfection, a nostalgia
that feels itself and its desire to be the only true reality; abstract, the existence of
Notes 673

social structures based only upon their factual presence and their sheer ability to
continue; abstract, finally, the form-giving intention which, instead of surmounting
the distance between these two abstract groups of elements, allows it to subsist,
which does not even attempt to surmount it but renders it sensuous as the lived
experience of the novel’s characters, uses it as a means of connecting the two groups
and so turns it into an instrument of composition. We have already recognized the
dangers that arise from the fundamentally abstract nature of the novel: the risk of
overlapping into lyricism or drama, the risk of narrowing reality so that the work
becomes an idyll, the risk of sinking to the level of mere entertainment literature.
These dangers can be resisted only by positing the fragile and incomplete nature of
the world as ultimate reality: by recognizing, consciously and consistently,
everything that points outside and beyond the confines of the world” (70-71).
To be sure, the tendency, especially in the English novel, for instance with
Joyce, went in the direction of making visible “the fragile and incomplete nature of
the world as ultimate reality”, but the aim was to draw again together the “fragile”
and “incomplete” into wholeness, the unity of the subjective consciousness. Yet this
double coding causes problems. Henry James combines the double goal of fragility
and unity of character with the strategy of “positing a character as the controlling
observer, to supersede the author’s vision and check his interventions” (M. Friedman
61), which, however, has the consequence that the consciousness selected by James
“as a controlling observer”, takes on “a splendid isolation”, becomes a kind of
abstraction in spite of the social context it is placed in. Dorothy Richardson’s failure
in her novel Pilgrimage results from the fact that she creates the consciousness of
her heroine as abstraction, where “there is no drama, no situation, no set scene”,
where “[n]othing happens” (Sinclair 57-58), where no beginning and no end is
recognizable. Virginia Woolf therefore notes that the task of the novelist is “[to]
trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each
sight or incident scores upon the consciousness” (1966-67, II, 107). In order to
counter the tendency towards abstraction, Woolf’s whole endeavor is to saturate the
stream of consciousness with outer, sensory details that function as stimuli and as
(symbolic) concretizations of feeling and thought — an effort that, however, does
not invalidate Lukács’s objection (“a nostalgia that feels itself and its desires to be
the only true reality”).
62
Abstraction in the novel does not serve, as it does in painting, to find a
new basis for ordering reality. Wilhelm Worringer argued in his influential book
Abstraction and Empathy (which appeared 1908, at the beginning of cubism) that in
the visual arts, “the primal artistic impulse” (“Urkunsttrieb”) searches for pure
abstraction as the only “possibility of repose within the confusion and obscurity of
the world picture” (81, my translation); and Kandinsky wrote a famous treatise about
the spirituality of abstract art, The Spiritual in Art, stating that the goal of abstract art
was the purification of the spiritual. Abstraction in literature, at least in the
mentioned cases, is concerned not with the gain of the really real, the essence behind
the surface, but with the loss or even negation of reality, or better, of the concept of
reality, in the sense of Sukenick’s statement: “The contemporary writer — the writer
who is acutely in touch with the life of which he is part — is forced to start from
scratch: Reality doesn’t exist, time doesn’t exist, personality doesn’t exist” (DN 41).
One of the consequences of abstraction is the metamorphosis of characters like
674 From Modernism to Postmodernism

Burlingame in Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor, who plays with masks in a series of
personal metamorphoses that make him take on the personality of many other
figures and appear at various places at the same time, thus personifying Barth’s
conviction that “the same life lends itself to any number of stories” (FO 4).
Ironically enough, Burlingame can find his identity only in the dialectic of
abstraction/concretization, by becoming a “blank”, disappearing from the scene, or,
according to one rumor, finally staying with his Indian ancestors.
63
The loss of the “objective” sum total, of a value system, leads to what
Barthelme calls the “trash phenomenon”, which we will discuss later on in more
detail. The proliferation of trash could lead to the “‘endless’ quality” and “sludge
quality” of the “filling” and “stuffing” (SW 96) of the situation in the text: “We like
books that have a lot of dreck in them, matter which presents itself as not wholly
relevant (or indeed, at all relevant) but which, carefully attended to, can supply a
kind of ‘sense’ of what is going on. This ‘sense’ is not to be obtained by reading
between the lines (for there is nothing there, in those white spaces) but by reading
the lines themselves — looking at them and so arriving at a feeling not of
satisfaction exactly, that is too much to expect, but of having read them, of having
‘completed’ them” (SW 106). Trash itself is an abstraction from values and a
negation of systems of differentiation, which the human being as a “meaning-
craving animal” (Berger) is bound to create. The “trash phenomenon” elevates
sameness, while judgmental appraisal would identify difference. Together with the
word “dreck”, the notion of “filling” is important in this quotation. The “filling” of
the situation with “dreck” implies an abstraction, formalization, and contingency of
sense and meaning; and, consequently, the reading process attains the same kind of
abstraction. The reading of the text is not meant and obviously not able to arrive “at
a feeling of satisfaction” but has to be satisfied with “having ‘completed’” the lines,
i.e., with the mechanical/abstract constitution of the text. This abstraction comes to
pass because not only “objectivity” but also “subjectivity” lose their potential of
meaning.
64
The representation of “cosmopsis”, which besets many of Barth’s pro-
tagonists and makes them unable to act and feel in accordance with the given
situation, is a new state of representing consciousness, a new form of abstraction. As
Malcolm Bradbury argues, this abstraction no longer results, from naturalism and its
milieu-theories that, by making the milieu the determining factor, decentralize the
human being, or from impressionism as an attitude of “aesthetic hyper-awareness”
(1979, 191). It does not originate from the abandonment of the balance between the
outer and the inner in the representation of character and from the shifting of the
reality-coordinates either towards the outer or the inner world; rather, it evolves
rather from doubts about the nature of “reality” itself. We live in a world where
“reality becomes slighter and more familiar, it fits within a style, it does not outrun
language” (Barthes 1968, 114; 1974, 54), to the exclusion of surprise, the unknown,
the incommensurable, which, however, loom in the background, or, as Nabokov
wrote in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941): “Men have learned to live with a
black burden, a huge aching hump: the supposition that ‘reality’ may be only a
‘dream.’ How much more dreadful it would be if the very awareness of your being
aware of reality’s dream-like nature were also a dream, a built-in hallucination” (39).
Notes 675

65
For details, see my essay “The Absurd and its Forms of Reduction in
Postmodern American Fiction”.
66
For Jac Tharpe, cosmopsis is a “transcendalism”, a mystical “view of
the whole” (27).
67
The figures of Barth’s stories often underlie or succumb to the
abstracting law of metamorphosis, are subjects in a plot they cannot control; they
become constellations or documents; they are mere fictions and also the narrators or
authors of these very fictions. Standing between patterns, which they fulfill or
imitate, they disintegrate more or less into roles according to the dictates of the
situation, while their actions decompose into non-actions, at best situationally
controlled episodes. Myths and legends offer tractable material because they are no
longer artful interpretations of the historical world but, once more abstracted, artful
interpretations of interpretations of the world, which, again once more abstracted,
can be “illuminated” and “echoed” as patterns — to use Barth’s terms — in the
parodic and comic modes.
68
Barth himself states: “The structure [...] is the structure of the
logarithmic spiral [...]: the Fibonacci series of numbers as it manifests itself in the
logarithmic spiral. The logarithmic spiral is one that expands exponentially and it
occurs all over nature. I was interested in the fact that if you unwind certain marine
mollusks like the chambered nautilus, for example, which unwinds in a logarithmic
spiral, and keep unwinding the spiral in that same ratio, it takes on the shape of some
of the great spiral galaxies, like the galaxy M-33 in Andromeda, which is part of the
Perseus series of constellations”. He goes on to say: “[I]n the three Chimera
novellas each novella happens to be about 1.6. times the size of the preceding
novella because that’s the Fibonacci series, the golden ratio” (McKenzie 137, 151).
69
“Stenciling” is defined as a “process by which you can produce patterns
and designs” (Tanner 1971, 164). 70 This passage appears in the section titled “The
Masturbatory Gesture”.
71
The three examples are listed in Malmgren 172.
72
Cf. Federman’s statement: “above all, all forms of duality will be
negated — especially duality: that double-headed monster which, for centuries now,
has subjected us to a system of values, an ethical and aesthetical system based on the
principles of good and bad, true and false, beautiful and ugly” (“Surfiction” 8).
73
See Jakobson 1966.

74
See also Kestner, a collection of essays has focused on Frank’s concept
of spatial form: Smitten and Daghistani.
75
In the attempt to emphasize the gap between language and reality and to
stress the immanent structure of fiction, literary criticism has further abstracted the
676 From Modernism to Postmodernism

use of the term “spatial”, speaking of the compositional fictional space that has to be
filled, structured, and given meaning. The term “space” in this case is only used
metaphorically. It does not refer to semantic space and only coincidentally to
“spatial” organization, and thus appears to lose its heuristic value. In a book like
Malmgren’s Fictional Space, the reference is only to “text space”. The term is used
for “discursive space”, “textual space”, or “compositional space”, for “alphabetical
space”, “lexical space” available to the fictionist for “expenditure of and
experimentation with, narrative energies”, or for “the space ‘occupied’ by the
reader” (51, 50, 173, 176, 51). In fact, there are scarcely any representative studies of
space, in the semantic sense, in the postmodern novel. By paying almost exclusive
attention to the rejection of mimesis in postmodern fiction or to metafictional
discourses, critics have neglected the facts that postmodern fiction still creates
worlds, that its worlds are still situationally structured, and that each situation
contains the element of space, however it is manifested. In the following, space will
generally be used in its literal sense, the term “spatial” also in the abstracted
meaning of simultaneity and cross-reference, in contrast to “sequential”.
76
See Mendilow; Meyerhoff; Noon; Church; Bradbury 1979. See also
Drechsel Tobin; Medina; Patrides; and Segre.
77
The conviction that all human notions of time are conceptual and
constructionist is based on what has been called by Dilthey the hermeneutic circle,
the problematics of the relationship between the particular and the general, the
impossibility and the necessity to abstract from the specific the nonspecific, the
conceptional.

78
Cf.. Rüsen; Nietzsche had already differentiated three of the mentioned
types of historiography; Koselleck. For an overview of postmodern positions on
history, see Kunow 1989.
79
For a general overview see Uhlig. I rely on some of his material, though
not on his argument which stresses the position of the past.
80
According to Hayden White, not only literature but also historiography
use a number of literary metaphors for the structuring of the past, such as romance,
comedy, tragedy, irony (1974; cf. also 1985). White takes the categories from Frye.
For a balanced evaluation of the relation between historiography and fiction, see
Hutcheon 1989. Contrary positions emphasize the difference between historiography
and fiction. They accentuate the fact that fiction gives a subjective view of events
and treats historical figures not as objects, but as subjects (Hamburger 113-14);
fiction need not furnish proofs for its statements and has a specific character in the
constructive “logic” of its assertions; it suspends disbelief on the reception side. For
criticism of White’s position see Dray; Golob; Mandelbaum; LaCapra.

81
Cf. Raleigh 43-55, 126-36; Buckley.
82
See D’haen and Bertens 9-31; Irmer; Wesseling; Bennett; Chénetier;
Engler; Rüdiger Kunow 1989; Attridge; Lenz et al.; R. Martin; Thiher 1990.
Notes 677

83
For more details, see Kunow 1990.
84
For the historic details and their treatment in The Sot-Weed Factor cf.
— in addition to the books on Barth cited — Diser; Holder; Weixlmann; Ewell.
85
See Krafft; Weinberger.
86
History-bashing continues in Pynchon’s other texts. In Vineland some-
body says that history “is no more worthy of respect than the average movie script,
and it comes about in the same way — soon as there is one version of a story,
suddenly it’s anybody’s pigeon. Parties you never heard of get to come in and
change it” (81). In his latest novel, Mason & Dixon, though it is set in the “Age of
Reason” (27), one of the characters says: “Who claims Truth, Truth abandons.
History is hir’d, or coerc’d, only in Interests that must ever prove base. She is too
innocent, to be left within the reach of anyone in Power [...] She needs rather to be
tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters” (350). This
deconstructive/reconstructive view takes on a more serious note in the Rev’d Wicks
Cherrycohe’s statement from his Christ and History, used as an epigram for chapter
35: “History is not Chronology, for that is left to lawyers, — nor is it Remembrance,
for Remembrance belongs to the People. History can as little pretend to the Veracity
of the one, as claim the Power of the other”, it is “not a Chain of single Links, for
one broken Link could lose us All,— rather, a great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long
and short, weak and strong, vanishing into the Mnemonick Deep, with only their
Destination in common” (349). Time is struggle and movement: “Down here, the
Rivalry with France, keen as ever, — out There, the Timeless, ev’rything upon the
Move, no pattern ever to repeat itself” (209). “In America [...] Time is the true River
that runs ‘round Hell” (334); quite generally, “Time is the Space that may not be
seen” (326), and history appears as a “Calling Into a Void” (179), “revealing
nothing, as it absorbs everything” (179). The choices are “Disciplin’d Rage for
Jesus” or “that Escape into the Void, which is the very Asian Mystery” (288) - or, in
postmodern times, the filling of the void with inventions.
87
See also Seed 36. The concept of plot has a long history. The Russian
formalists differentiated “story”, which contains a mere sequence of actions and
events, from “plot”: Both include the same events, but in the plot the events are
arranged and connected according to an orderly sequence”. (Ehrlich 57, 58, 67-68,
116. See also Jakobson 1971.) Modern anthropology and semiotics, for instance in
the theory of Eco (1989, 203, 206), blur the difference between plot and story
because they do not believe, like the Formalists, that “plot constitutes the specific
peculiarity of art” (Ehrlich 67), but think that plot belongs to life itself and that the
reader “only recognizes life as real if its contingent elements are removed and it
seems to have been selected and united in a plot”. In the same direction points
Caserio (3-5). He, like most contemporary theorists, suspends the difference between
art and life, considering the latter as the result of a sequence of constructed
stories/plots. If one starts out from a contrast between plot and story, there are two
possibilities. One may assume, as the Russian Formalists and Frye (85-88) do, that
life is essentially formless, and emphasize — in contrast to the story of life — the
678 From Modernism to Postmodernism

truth of plot; or, conversely, one may argue from a mimetic standpoint like Forster
(152) and Stein (1969, 19-20) and demand of the writer, in Forster’s words, “to pot
with the plot! Break it up, boil it down. [...] All that is pre-arranged is false” (108).
Postmodern reception-theory starts out from the communication-model text with its
three aspects: production, mediation, and reception. If one conceives of life as a
number of prefigured plots and of human life as a continuous, dynamic “emplot-
ment”, then it is logical enough to differentiate three levels of emplotment in
narrative; first, the emplotment as anthropological constant, i.e., in Ricoeur’s terms,
as human narrative activity in the life world; second, the configured coherent
emplot-ment in the text; and third, a dynamic activity, i.e., emplotment, on the part
of the reader, who interprets the text and its configurations. This means for
postmodern writers that even if they reject and dissolve plot(s), they have to reckon
with the fact that the reader, following the human narrative instinct, reconstitutes the
plot or creates a plot-coherence by him- or herself. See for an overview Dipple.
88
See Crane, who differentiates “plots of action”, “plots of character”,
and “plots of thought”.
89
Barth’s narrator in Lost in the Funhouse interrupts himself with such
deliberations as: “So far there’s been no real dialogue, very little sensory detail, and
nothing in the way of a theme. And a long time has gone by already without
anything happening; it makes a person [and the reader] wonder” (74). Barthelme, in
Snow White, and Federman, in Take It or Leave It, parodying reader expectations,
even insert questionnaires into their texts. This thus accentuates not only the
simultaneity of story and fabricating the story but also the copresence of text,
fabricating the text, and receiving and judging the text with questions like “Do you
like the story so far? Yes ( ) No ( )”, “Would you like a war? Yes ( ) No ( )”, “Has
the work, for you, a metaphysical dimension? Yes ( ) No ( )” (SW 82); or “Have you
understood up to now that Moinos dead or alive is only a symbolic figure?” and “Is
it clear that the journey is a metaphor for something else?” (ToL n.p.) Simultaneity
affects character and action. In Barth, the afflicted character cannot decide where to
go, because one choice is as good as the other. Being stifled in a place or a situation,
he has a “condition” that Barth ironically and playfully calls “cosmopsis” (The End
of the Road, The Sot-Weed Factor). Billy, the protagonist in Vonnegut’s
Slaughterhouse-Five who has survived the fire bombing of Dresden, has become
unstuck in time. Time-travel takes him from one set of time to another, all times,
past, present, and future having become simultaneous, at least potentially. While in
postmodern fiction actions stop or become incidental because actions aim strictly at
a sequence of time and at change, and both cannot be achieved without freedom of
will, events often replace actions because they are potentially multiperspectual; they
come from outside, are simultaneously contingent, relationless, without logical
sequence or interaction. In the strife between the extraordinary and the ordinary,
crucial for Barthelme, Elkin and DeLillo, the differences are blurred and the one
becomes simultaneously the other. Sameness and difference, entropy and renewal,
however, stand side by side without reconciliation in Pynchon’s novels.
90
See also Spanos: “It is [...] no accident that the paradigmatic archetype
of the postmodern [...] literary imagination is the anti-detective story (and its anti-
Notes 679

psychoanalytical analogue), the formal purpose of which is to evoke the impulse to


‘detect’ and/or psychoanalyze in order to violently frustrate it by refusing to solve
the crime or find the cause for the neurosis” (1972, 154).
91
Eliade writes in his The Myth of the Eternal Return: “[T]he myth of
eternal repetition [...] has the meaning of a supreme attempt toward the
‘staticization’ of becoming, toward annulling the irreversibility of time” (123).
92
The references to Empedocles in the novel are discussed by Matanle.
93
See Friedman and Humphrey.
94
See the ironically treated epiphanies of Stephen Dedalus in the fourth
part of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
95
See Fiske: “The routine pleasures of popular culture may derive
ultimately from the sense of chronological control it offers”. It gives a sense of
power; and power is part of the “matrix of pleasure, relevance, and empowerment”
which “lies at the core of popular culture” (66) — and, one may add, not only of
popular culture.
96
See the chapter on mobility and immobility in Hoffmann 1978.
97
See also Jameson 1992 and D. Harvey 201ff.
98
Virilio, 1991 and 1988. Docherty in his essay on “The Ethics of
Alterity: Postmodern Character”, uses the same terms to differentiate the paradigm
of the postmodern novel, i.e., “appearance versus disappearance”, from that of the
traditional and modern novel, “appearance versus reality”.
99
Tindall speaks of the “analogical embodiment” of a “complex of feeling
and thought” (12-13), and Brumm differentiates a “cause-linked ‘realistic’ symbol”
from the “transcendent or magic symbol” (363).
100
Many other novels, Elkin’s The Franchiser and Gaddis’s JR, to name
only two, show a similar tendency to expand the tenor of the symbol. They both use
basic spatial configurations, either the indefinite expanse of space (Elkin) or the
definite concentration of place (Gaddis) to deal with fundamental antitheses like
sameness vs. difference, ideology of business vs. meaning of art and existence.
Barthelme’s symbolic “picture stories”, as in “The Glass Mountain” and “The
Balloon”, exhibit the same patterns of tension between vehicle and tenor, object and
meaning, except that they radicalize the tension between the two, fantasizing both to
the extreme, in fact to a point where the vehicle loses its stability and the tenor yields
either its articulability (the balloon) or its genuineness (the glass mountain). Irony,
parody, and the comic perspective have attained here full dominance also over the
symbol, without, however, destroying its operational function of stimulating not
meaning but the question of meaning. Finally, in texts by Gass, Sukenick, Barth, and
others, we reach a stage where “natural”, spatial figurations like the river or the
680 From Modernism to Postmodernism

labyrinth, or massless, “abstract”, and “artificial” formations, indeed geometric


patterns — up, down, and out, the spiral, and the Moebius strip — are used as
symbols that describe both the course of life and the poetics of the postmodern
narrative.
101
As this example demonstrates quite clearly, the terminology for the
signifying activity of the text varies widely. Barth for instance uses metaphor,
symbol, and emblem quite interchangeably. In fact, in postmodern times, the word
“metaphor” has sometimes replaced the term “symbol”. Figurative signs like
symbols that aim to hold together the meaning of two realms, a material and a
spiritual one, may appear to be mere metaphors connecting signifiers with other
signifiers without signifieds, if the indefiniteness of language and the gap between
language and the world are considered crucial for a new orientation of categorical
thinking. But signifiers always have signifieds, whatever their relation to external
reality, and narrative always builds up a world, even if it is a “world within the
word” (Gass). This world is situationally grounded; it establishes itself in terms of
space, time, character, action/event. Words assume the character of signifiers of a
material world, for instance a picture, a house, or a landscape, and their signifieds as
corporeal entities can provide access on another level, in a secondary interpretation,
to a “higher” synthesizing meaning, or to a “deeper” level of significance. Thus we
should speak of symbols, not of metaphors (except in border cases, of which more
later), when we analyze a secondary meaning of the signified in fiction, a thing, or a
person.
102
For the relationship between information theory and the arts, see
Moles.
103
The terms labyrinth and maze used here interchangeably have been
applied to the complex works of many authors, among them Shakespeare, Sterne,
Hawthorne, Melville, and Joyce; they also have been used to open situations in
theory and criticism, but in most cases loosely and metaphorically. For discussion of
the labyrinth as formal choice, see, among others, Senn, who lists and quotes from a
number of arbitrarily chosen texts. See also Fletcher; Gutierrez 1983-83 and 1985;
Hogle; Koerner; A. Martin; Hillis Miller; Redekop; R.R. Wilson.
104
Kern distinguishes, as most critics do, the multicursal from the
unicursal labyrinth.
105
For Deleuze and Guattari, a rhizomic structure is like a tangle of bulbs
and tubers appearing like “rats squirming one on top of the other!” (Rhizome [qtd. in
Eco 1984a, 81]).
106
See Docherty 1983; Cixous and Cohen; and a number of statements by
John Barth and other postmodern writers.
107
Roland Barthes distinguishes between “real character” and “figure”
(1947, 67); Tanner uses the term “figure” for Pynchon’s V. (1971, 164); Russell
employs the term 649 “literary figures” (1982); Lauzen speaks of a “deliberate
Notes 681

flattening out” of the characters in Pynchon, Vonnegut, and Gaddis (101). For W.
Martin, postmodern fictional characters are “fantastic, formulaic, and metafictional
creatures” that have “only a remote resemblance to people as we know them” (119);
and P. Currie speaks of “flat, etiolated figures without any redeeming psychological
chiaroscuro” (66). The opinions vary depending on the fact whether these figures in
their anti-realistic depthlessness and surface containment, dispersal, and
fragmentation seem to represent our fragmented surface-contained world or not. One
of the critics who see the deconstructions of character as referring to a deconstructed
world is Jameson (1992). But postmodern writers like both Barth and Sukenick also
confirm the referentiality of the postmodern texts (Barth, “The Literature of
Exhaustion”, Sukenick 1975a). The facts that the borderlines between reality and
fiction are blurred, and reality appears as a mental (linguistic) construct, however,
relativizes the concept of referentiality regardless of ideological positions. David
Carroll therefore turns against the theoretical validity of the term “anti-
representation” (1982, 25). Critics like McCaffery (Postmodern Fiction xxv) and
Hutcheon (1988) have noted the political relevance of postmodern fiction ,though a
postmodern fictionist like William Gass affirms the opposite, the non-relevance of
his fiction — which again points to the paradoxicality of postmodern fiction.
108
For the concept of identity, see D. J. DeLevita; Odo Marquard and
Karlheinz Stierle, eds.; Erik H. Erikson 1979 and 1980; Wylie Sypher 1962; Pütz
(esp. the section “Imagination and Self-Definition’’ 28-60) gives a comprehensive
survey of the concept of identity in literature and literary criticism.
109
Bersani holds that covered, rapturous desire comes to “explode the
myth of personality”, the concept of a unitary character, already in texts like
Wuthering Heights (x, 214). Others see the unitary character shaken in modernism.
Glicksberg describes character in modern texts as lacking an “essence” or “a
presiding pattern of unity” (xi-xii), and D. Brown perceives in modernist texts de-
unified, incoherent characters.
110
Docherty maintains that surface characters can have their own special
interest since the empty spaces left by the method of creating only surfaces and facts
activate the participation of the reader to great extent than do the traditional
characters of the “realistic” novels, whose mimetic tendency reflecting in the
hierarchy of characters is dictatorial and demonstrates the author’s invading claim to
authority. For Docherty what remains in “dialogue fiction” (Barthelme, Brautigan,
Gaddis) that disconnects the speech acts from the character is a “series of
subjectivity”, which are not masters of their language. The reader puts them
together, who finally, “is only character left at play in the production of fiction” —
which is of course a rather provocative overstatement of the case (1983, 40, xvi, 8).
Cixous and Cohen argue just like Bersani, now in Lacanian terms, that the
representational character of the traditional novel represses desire and the
unconscious, controls the ways of feeling and reflection, and “patronizes meaning”
(385) by the (phallic, masculine) symbolic order in which the character is placed to
the debit of the imaginative (feminine) order, which is given no chance of
expression. Docherty finally also calls the relation author-character-reader in the
traditional novel phallic and sees in the surface-characterization of postmodern
682 From Modernism to Postmodernism

fiction the chance to establish a fruitful connection between author and reader and
“inter-subjective motivation, in whose mobility their positions can interfuse” so that
finally, with the arrival of the dispersed character, the “destruction [...] of the stable
familial home” can take place and make room for “the possibility of a feminist
writing” (1983, 239), for liberty and multiplicity, a free interplay. In the spirit of the
counterculture, Tatham speaks of the characters in postmodern texts as the “selves
infolding and outfolding in dazzling perspectives, leaving the merest trace of a
script” (138). The reader is asked to abandon the “rigid, restricted notion that you
must be a single, cohesive, unified persona” and to “tune in” with “past and future
selves” (145) (A. Fokkema 61-62). Russell has remarked that this abandonment of
fixed character/ego structures was the real attack on bourgeois society more effective
than any active rebellion. Of course there are negative reactions to mere surface
character (1982). Graff complains about the “[d]issolution of ego boundaries” (57).
There is obviously the danger that one ideology (of the unified, autonomous self) is
replaced by another one (of the dispersed, multiple, liberated self).
111
The question of morality has been transferred by modernism and
postmodernism from the character to the aesthetic quality of the text and its truth
value. In Elkin’s words: “Of course any work of art which is genuine is by necessity
and definition moral” (LeClair and McCaffery 111); or in Sukenick’s phrase,
referring to Flaubert: “’The only obligation of the writer is the morality of the right
sensation.’ That’s quite true” (LeClair and McCaffery 288); or, in Gass’s terms (who
radicalizes modernist ambiguity): “I don’t know, most of the time, what I believe.
Indeed, as a fiction writer I find it convenient [...] just to move into a realm where
everything is held in suspension”; and “it would be a grievous disappointment if we
ever solved anything” (LeClair and McCaffery 22, 30). Hawkes says that fiction
“should be an act of rebellion against all the constraints of the conventional
pedestrian mentality around us. Surely it should destroy conventional morality”
(Bellamy 1974, 108).
112
See also the study of Hochman, who sees an “underlying unity” (98) of
character in psychological conflict and writes that “characters in literature have more
in common with people in life than contemporary discourse suggests” (7), that
language furnishes “the image of a character [...] before we become conscious of the
language that generates the character” (41). For him, “characters are utterly
embedded in texts and utterly detachable from them” (74). See also Swinden.
113
Cf. Humphrey; Friedman; Alter; Cohn.
114
The late-modern writer Bellow, though he (as also Malamud or Ellison)
attempts to adhere to a concept of personality, notes: “The person, the character, as
we knew him in the plays of Sophocles, or Shakespeare, Cervantes, Fielding and
Balzac, has gone from us. Instead of a unitary character with his unitary character,
his ambitions, his passions, his soul, his fate, we find in modern literature an oddly
dispersed, ragged, mingled, broken, amorphous creature whose outlines are
everywhere, whose being is bathed in mind as the tissues are bathed in blood, and
who is impossible to circumscribe in a scheme of time” (29).
Notes 683

115
It is, however, not only the Marxist critic who has noted and indicated
the dispersion of the self in postmodern times. See, for instance, Laing 1965 and
1967; and Lasch 1979 and 1984. Sypher has analyzed the Loss of the Self in Modern
Literature and Art.
116
Cf. Greimas 1966 and 1983; see for similar, plot-oriented positions
Todorov 1969; Barthes and Duisit. Chatman, ch. 3, sticks to the opposition of deep
and surface level but sees characters already at the deep level of narrative. See also
Hamon 1983, who avoids the concept of deep structure but retains the notion of
actants. Todorov, in a revision of his initial position, proposed a differentiation
between apsychological and psychological texts, thus however, only returning to a
distinction of action/plot-and character-dominated texts.
117
For Jean Ricardou even the study of character and time and space in
narrative is suspect because it would be the result of “referential ideology” and
strengthens the “realistic illusion” and traditional criticism.
118
See also Johnston. I am indebted to his argument.
119
See also the interview with Gass in LeClair and McCaffery: “A
character for me is a linguistic location in a book toward which a great part of the
rest of the text stands as a modifier. Just as the subject of a sentence, say, is modified
by the predicate, so frequently some character” (28).
120
One of the prominent structuralists, Emile Benveniste, writes that “[i]t
is in and through language that man constitutes himself as a subject, because
language alone establishes the concept ‘ego’ in reality, in its reality which is that of
the being (224). Yet he sees himself the limits of formalism and the danger of a
purely linguistic approach. He deplores that “linguistic analysis, in order to be
scientific, should ignore meaning and apply it solely to the definition and
distribution of elements. The conditions of rigor imposed on the procedure require
that that elusive, subjective and unclassifiable element which is meaning or sense be
eliminated [...] It is to be feared that if this method becomes general, linguistics may
never be able to join any of the other sciences of man or culture” (10).
121
See for detailed overview A. Fokkema, who uses a “semiotic” ap-
proach, endeavoring to combine a representational and textual view of character, and
considers character to be “a cumulative sign” (16-17) in the text with a referential
function, which can be analyzed in terms of a number of codes like the logical, the
biological, the psychological, the social codes or the physical code. I am indebted to
his lucid analysis of positions in the representation of character in the novel and use
some of the material quoted in the book for my own argument.
122
Not much has been written about emotion in postmodernism in general
and in postmodern fiction specifically. See Hoffmann and Hornung 1997, and my
essay in the collection. On the theories of emotion see also Boruah.
123
See his section on “Belief and desire”, 228-39.
684 From Modernism to Postmodernism

124
Into the emptiness left by deconstructed beliefs enter desire and
obsessions.
125
Textual dogmatism of course denies the possibility of perception.
Derrida writes: “As to perception, I should say at once I organized it as a necessary
conservation. I was extremely conservative. Now I don’t know what perception is
and I don’t believe that anything like perception exists. Perception is precisely a
concept, a concept of an intuition or of a given origination from the thing itself,
present itself in its meaning independently from language, from the system of
reference [...] I don’t believe that there is any perception” (1988b, 122).
126
I am indebted to Iser’s analysis of Beckett’s text.
127
Jean Ricardou who is most vehemently opposed to a “realistic” or
representational reading of the New Novel, which only would serve the “ruling
ideology” and the interests of the ruling class and the state, sees two stages of the
New Novel, also in Robbe-Grillet’s fiction, which would coexist with the two phases
of criticism: “The one, which has been called the First New Novel, operates a
tendentious division in the diegetic Unity and inaugurates in this way a period of
contestation however, for better or for worse, it manages to safeguard a certain unity.
The other phase [...] the New New Novel, dramatizes the impossible assembly of a
diegetic Plurality and inaugurates in this way a subversive period” (qtd. in Carroll
1982, 201, from Le Nouveau Roman). See also Carroll for an analysis of the critical
evaluation of Robbe-Grillet and the New Novel, under the heading “Structuralism
and Fiction: The Negation, Displacement, and Return of the Subject” (1982, 14-26).
128
Federman writes: “I myself have tried to fragment language in my
fiction though typography ([...] indeed, my interest in typography is as much an
interest in exploring the way in which syntax can be distorted and manipulated as it
is in the shape or design of words on the page)”. He compares himself with
Sukenick: “my typographical experiments remain somewhat artificial, whereas
Sukenick’s linguistic distortions seem very natural” (LeClair and McCaffery 149).
And Barth speaks of Hawkes’s “outrageous situations and unforgettable scenes
refracted through a lense of rhetoric that transfigures them” (LeClair and McCaffery
10). Kohler in Gass’s The Tunnel speaks of “that fractured plurality of egos” (43).
129
Robbe-Grillet wrote in For a New Novel: what the author “asks of him
[the reader] is no longer to receive ready-made a world completed, full, closed upon
itself, but on the contrary to participate in a creation, to invent in his turn the work
and the world — and thus to learn to invent his own life” (156).
130
For these phenomena, Brooke-Rose employs the “rhetorical” concept
of “stylization” (1981, 373-75).
131
In his essay “The New Tradition in Fiction”, Sukenick notes, quoting
John Ashberry, that there are “two ways of going about things: one is to put
everything in and the other is to leave everything out” (42). In an interview, Elkin
Notes 685

speaks of Fitzgerald’s “putter-inners” and “taker-outers”, defining his own narrative


strategy with the remark: “I don’t believe that less is more. I believe that more is
more. [...] There’s a famous exchange between Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe in
which Fitzgerald criticizes Wolfe for one of his novels [...] I’d rather be a putter-
inner than a taker-outer” (LeClair and McCaffery 109).
132
Ezra Pound used the term “image” for the same demand to express
emotion and thought indirectly, and for him “An ‘Image’ is that which presents an
intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” (1913, 203). Hemingway,
finally, expresses himself in quite similar terms; what he wants to relate is “the real
thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion” (305).
133
In my list of the qualities of actions, some of the terms (for instance,
‘false self’) are taken from Laing 1965, passim.
134
E. M. Forster rejects Aristotle’s position and notes that we are not
interested in the imitation of an action, but rather in the “secret life which each of us
lives privately” (85).
135
See, for instance, Kaulbach; Ryle; Parsons; E. Goffman 1974; Lenk;
Care and Landesman; Brand.
136
See for entropy The Crying of Lot 49: Abernethy; Lyons and Franklin;
Mangel; Plater 1-63, 220-24; Schmitz 112-25; Slade 1974; Young 69-77;
Simberloff.
137
On Oedipa as a quester, see Cowart; and Brugière.
138
Hierophany is the term created by Mircea Eliade: “From the most
elementary hierophany ... to the supreme hierophany ... there is no solution of
continuity. In each case we are confronted by the same mysterious act — the
manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong
to our world, in objects that are an integral part of our natural ‘profane’ world” (qtd.
in Mendelson 122).
139
LeClair borrows the term from Gregory Bateson.
140
We will here concentrate on the imagination, or rather, on the activity
of the imagination, without probing into its origin or ground. The manifestation of
the imaginative activity, the imaginary, takes a variety of shapes depending on its
stimulants. The imagination meets the needs of different historical contexts; it
fulfills equally the requirements of the finite mind and the specific situation it relates
to, both of which condition the shaping of the imaginary in its particular form. The
conceptualization of the imagination as faculty and activity has of course its own
history that can here only be touched upon. “Initially the imagination had occupied a
lower rank, not least because, through its link to the senses and memory it was
present as a latent subversion, if not an actual defiance, of a reason-dominated
hierarchy. But in the sixteenth century, imagination began its advance, and toward
686 From Modernism to Postmodernism

the end of the eighteenth, it gained prominence thanks to its multiple uses” (Iser
1993, 181). But even then the “conceptual definitions” of this “ever-expanding
faculty” “melt away into metaphors that unravel this ‘power’ into a series of images
for an activity that for the most part cannot be conceptualized” (182). There are
several reasons why the imagination has so seldom been scrutinized by philosophy
the way other faculties of the mind were. For one, the imagination transcends
rationality and retains traces at least of mystery and the beyond. Many (rational and
empiricist) systems of thought would rather do without a concept of imagination that
could not easily be categorized. Furthermore, “the very availability and self-ensured
success of imaginative experience hindered rather than helped its comprehension in
theoretical claims”. And third, as Sartre notes, there is a close relation between the
creative function of the imagination and its image-forming power, while there is an
absence of images in philosophical discourse. Philosophers are therefore inclined to
conceive of philosophical thinking as image-free, which excludes imagination from
their attention. Many have followed the lead of Plato, who stated that “a theoretical
inquiry no more employs images than does a factual investigation”, until, in a turn of
the tide, Heidegger would complain that philosophical thinking is “charmless and
image-poor” (qtd. in Casey x).
141
See Coleridge’s much-quoted “definition”: “The imagination then I
consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary imagination I hold to be the
living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the
finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary I
consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as
identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and
in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or
where this process is rendered impossible, yet still, at all events, it struggles to
idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are
essentially fixed and dead. Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with
but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory
emancipated from the order of time and space. [...] equally with the ordinary
memory it must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association”
(1958, 202). For the positive reception of romantic ideas of the imagination in
modern literature, see Riquelme.
142
See Kearney 1988, 261-65. I am indebted to Kearney’s discussion of
the postmodern imagination and in part follow him.
143
Yet speculation is not all. The postmodern imagination has at least two
more levels, which in fact connect it to modernist ideas. First, one might quote
Kristeva’s “melancholic imagination”, which marks the rifts and ruptures in the self
that appear to lie at the ground of the postmodern fiction, just as violence and
paranoia do, even if they are playfully relativized. And second, the belief in the
transposing power of the imagination to continues to create what Roland Barthes
calls “jouissance”, or the modernists the moment of “revelation” or “being” or
“vision”, now, however resulting from language as the imaginary. Gass writes in On
Being Blue: “[S]uch are the sentences we should like to love — the ones which love
us and themselves as well — incestuous sentences — sentences which make an
Notes 687

imaginary speaker speak the imagination loudly to the reading eye; that have a kind
of orality transmogrified: not the tongue touching the genital tip, but the idea of the
tongue, the thought of the tongue [...] ah! after exclamations, groans, with order
gone, disorder on the way, we subside through sentences like these, the risk of
senselessness like this, to float like leaves on the restful surface of that world of
words to come” (57-58). Furthermore, through all the playful, melancholy, or
ecstatic experiences of the surface of the world or of the words, shimmers the void
that the play of the imagination and its words seeks to cover and to discover.
144
See Poenicke, Dark Sublime. Weiskel, a little one-sidedly, calls Kant’s
sublime the negative version of the sublime, which as such designates the alienation
of the subject, the deconstruction of the self in the sublime experience (44-45).
145
The sublime is transferred to the human achievement in technology,
which attains an awe-inspiring sublime dimension — though in fact the sublime’s
claim for transcendence, for a transpersonal and transhuman horizon, should make
“a humanistic sublime [...] an oxymoron” (Weiskel 3). For Perry Miller, however,
“the TRUE SUBLIME behind the obvious SUBLIME of the immense pageant of
Technology [...] is MIND itself”. The myth of the American dream can be seen in
the “general [American] conviction that ultimate Sublimity in the creation is human
Mind (especially when dependent entirely on sense impression), because it can
demonstrably cope with infinite expanse of Nature, can keep pace with further and
further discoveries, can follow the dynamic flow” (321). The urban vista, with the
grandeur of its skyscrapers, the overpowering spectacle of the rocket launching, or
the moon landing would then be sublime signatures of the mind, inspiring the viewer
with both terror and delight and stimulating the flow of high energy and empowering
self-reliance. The fact that the space formerly occupied by universal reason is now a
void ironizes and comicalizes the human belief in the all-mightiness of the mind.
146
Cf. Friedrich Schiller: “Thus the sublime affords us an egress from the
sensuous world in which the beautiful would gladly hold us forever captive. Not
gradually (for there is no transition from dependence to freedom), but suddenly and
with a shock it tears the independent spirit out of the net in which a refined
sensuousness has entoiled it, and which binds all the more tightly the more gossamer
its weave” (201-2).
147
What endears the imagination to the postmodern mind is the idea of
freedom, often called spontaneity. What is important is not so much the object and
the content of the artefact, the achievement of something “new”, but rather the
productive art-process, the creativity without restraint. Kant remarks: “Insofar as
imagination is spontaneity, I sometimes also entitle it the productive imagination”
(Critique of Pure Reason, qtd. in Warnock 15), and for Sartre “imagining
consciousness [...] presents itself to itself as an imagining consciousness, that is as a
spontaneity” (qtd. in Casey 67). According to Kant, a spontaneous act is a process
that “begins on itself”, and spontaneity is “the mind’s power of producing
representations from itself” (qtd. in Warnock 22). Of course, the concept of
spontaneity has changed and has lost its obvious link to the causal processes of
consciousness. The spontaneously imagining act does not succumb to any
688 From Modernism to Postmodernism

questioning or comparison to other activities of consciousness. Spontaneity of the


creative act is corroborated by the self-evidence of what it achieves. The imaginary
experience (and its representation) is incorrigible, non-verifiable, and non-falsifiable.
The mode of imaging is now possibility, not actuality, necessity, or logical truth; it is
always partial, multiform, and incomplete. The limitlessness of the imagination is
transferred into the unending possibilities of storytelling, which finds a new basis in
a narrative “metaphysics of multiplicity” (Schulz viii). No longer society and its
moral laws, but rather life and its energies appear to be the frame of reference. The
human mind sees its principle of imaginative creativity, the supposing of
possibilities, as the correlative of the activities of the universe, in which
“possibilizing” and change seem the only certainties, and the mind is willing to
accept a state of uncertainty and indefiniteness (which includes infinity) as the
positive world principle of order. It is not the Kantian kind of order that the
imagination serves but still an idea of order, the postmodern idea of order that
includes chaos. Kant’s idea of the “free play” of imagination is taken literally and
made absolute. Following this direction, Bateson can thus see “Mind” in its fluidity
as the dominant quality of the cosmos, and the imagination as part of and the
confirmer of this universal Mind. This is, of course, only the theoretical view. In
practice, the various (contrasting) functions of the imagination and its ambivalent
relationship with reflection, (existential) feeling, and meaning, make for tension and
strife, on which we will focus in the following paragraphs.
148
The terms “satire” and “satiric” here are used without differentiation,
since satire is commonly understood as the term for the genre as well as the mode of
writing.
149
John Tilton, in his study of Anthony Burgess, John Barth, and Kurt
Vonnegut, has noted that “cosmic satire” can transcend topical social satire. His
phrasing in speaking of “a profound satiric vision, a vision, ultimately tragic in its
implications” shows, however, the all-too frequent medley of terms, which has no
heuristic value (Cosmic Satire 18).
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Index

Absurd: 20, 35, 152, 164, 201-04,


412-414, 679 (note 100);“Daumier”
207-217, 220, 239, 247, 254, 296,
477-78; The Dead Father 153, 166,
331, 370, 471, 480, 521, 525, 547,
265, 267, 354, 379-80, 543; “The
608-612, 620-21, 675 (note 65)
Dolt”: 64, 272; “The Glass
Mountain”: 392, 410-412, 679 (note
Action/Event: 20, 119, 120, 121, 129,
100); “The Indian Uprising”: 23, 264,
130, 199, 261, 263, 269, 307, 320,
321; “Sentence”: 67, 267, 323; Snow
339, 345, 364, 439, 462, 497, 503,
White: 133, 234, 237, 248, 257, ,266,
680 (note 101)
300, 351-52, 369, 372-75, 377, 440,
544, 674 (note 63), 678 (note 89)
Adler, Renata: 15, 296, 548-49 The
Speedboat: 548-49
Barth, John: 15, 16, 21, 22, 27, 28-29,
31, 34, 38, 42, 45, 49, 51, 54, 57, 59,
Adorno, Theodor: 58, 59, 80-82, 85,
60-61, 62-63, 64, 65, 66, 68-69, 70-
93, 96, 148, 173, 283, 285, 331
71, 73, 74, 83, 84, 90, 92, 98, 99,
100-03, 110-111, 119, 126, 132, 133,
Apple, Max: 15, 197, 247; Free
135-136, 137, 138, 147, 150-51, 155-
Agents: 197; “Post-Modernism”: 197
56, 158, 161, 163, 169-170, 171-72,
177-79, 181, 183, 184, 186-87, 193-
As-If: 161, 176, 185, 188, 325, 403,
94, 203-05, 206-07, 211, 214-17, 220,
417, 497, 543
221, 223, 232, 235, 236, 238, 241-43,
245, 251, 252-55, 258, 259, 280, 286,
Auster, Paul: 15, 337, 479, 630, 631-
289, 293-95, 296, 297, 303, 306,
32, 636
307,. 309-312, 313, 314, 315, 319,
321-22, 324-36, 327-28, 334-36, 343,
Bakhtin, Mikhail: 28, 122, 131, 238,
363, 364-65, 380, 383, 392, 401-05,
671 (note 53)
415, 425, 432-34, 442, 452, 466-67,
470, 480, 497, 503, 508, 511, 521-26,
Barthelme, Donald: 15, 17, 23, 27,
535-36, 543, 551, 556, 559, 563-65,
29, 34, 44, 45, 51, 59, 62-67, 97, 99,
579, 599, 617, 640, 652, 659, (note
100-01, 133, 136, 137, 153, 166, 167,
2), 674 (note 62 and 64), 675 (note 67
180, 183, 184, 190, 195-96, 198, 203,
and 68), 678 (note 89), 680 (note
205-07, 220, 221, 234, 237, 241,-42,
101), 684 (note 128); Chimera: 62,
248, 251, 252, 264, 265, 266, 267,
220, 235, 236, 293 “Bellerophoniad”:
272, 296, 300, 311, 315, 318, 321,
56, 62, 100, 238, 254, 293; 311,
323, 339, 342-44, 351-369, 372-75,
“Dunyazadiad”: 62, 155-56, 296, 310,
377, 379,-80, 389, 392, 410-14, 416,
325; “Perseid”: 325-26, 327, 432; The
420, 422, 440, 453, 464, 465, 467,
End of the Road: 65, 71, 98, 204, 232,
468, 471-72, 475, 476-78, 489, 485,
334, 551; The Floating Opera: 150-
492, 498, 507, 540, 542-48, 549, 550,
51, 155, 203-04; Giles Goat-Boy: 70,
578, 593, 599, 615, 618, 674, (note
100, 136, 171-72, 204, 236, 293, 311,
63), 678 (note 89), 679 (note 100),
313, 324, 328, 334-336, 392, 401-
681 (note 110); “The Balloon”: 100,
405, 428;The Last Voyage of
742 From Modernism to Postmodernism

Someone the Sailor: 235, 309-310,


322; LETTERS:68, 70, 74, 181, 221, Behavior: 22, 23, 90, 105, 107, 110,
242, 255-56, 263, 293, 311-12, 426; 129, 219, 233, 253, 352, 355, 373,
“Literature of Exhaustion”: 61, 291, 417, 427, 429, 438, 453, 460, 462-63,
681 (note 107) ;“Literature of 468, 473, 485, 519, 526, 530, 535,
Replenishment”: 55, 241; Lost in the 539-42, 543, 546, 548, 550-51, 558,
Funhouse:59, 100, 103, 126, 156, 561-63, 599-600, 607, 610, 612, 634,
169-70, 262 315, 324-25, 404, 536, 635, 640, 642, 645
678 (note 89); “Anonymiad”: 497,
579; “Echo”: 297; “Life-Story”: 206- Bellow, Saul: 54, 77, 168, 202, 337,
07, 559; “Lost in the Funhouse”: 103, 358, 359, 385, 682 (note 114)
404-05, 559; “Menelaiad”: 194, 250,
254, 443, 466-67, 508, 511, 521, 521- Bertens, Hans: 35-36, 202, 450, 474,
26; “Night-Sea Journey”: 92, 100, 623, 659 (notes 5 and 6), 661 (note
169-70, 211, 214-17, 322, 383, 403; 7), 663 (note 25), 667 (note 41), 676
“Title”: 254, 307, 319, 322; On With (note 82)
the Story: 15, 74, 84, 101-03, 163,
177, 178; “Waves”: 159-60; Borges, Jorge: 15, 21, 27, 42, 61, 77,
“Postmodernism, Chaos Theory, and 110, 176-77, 179, 188, 189, 219, 220,
the Romantic Arabesque”:110-11; 221, 242, 243, 245-57, 259, 286, 293,
The Sot-Weed Factor: 100, 136, 178- 295, 296, 304, 309, 315-17, 324, 365,
79, 238, 293, 294-95, 313, 334, 556, 366, 381, 382, 389, 403, 416, 432,
557, 644, 674 (note 62) 434, 448, 465, 471, 504-05, 540, 670
(note 48) 671 (note 56); Labyrinths:
Barthes, Roland: 22, 39, 72-73, 82, 189, 246, 295, 304, 315-17, 382, 416,
159, 192-93, 274, 310, 389-90, 425, 504; “The Library of Babel”: 216,
426, 439-40, 457, 474, 488, 563, 588, 247, 504; “A New Refutation of
607, 614, 652, 662 (note 12), 674 Time”: 504-05; “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis
(note 64), 680 (note 107), 686 (note Tertius”: 110, 403, 504
143)
Brautigan, Richard: 15, 17, 23, 51,
Baudrillard, Jean: 17, 39, 40-41, 129, 70, 137, 196, 264, 265-66, 297, 299-
367, 659 (note 7) 300, 311, 312, 321, 323, 417, 468,
548-51, 554, 560, 561-63, 599-600,
Beckett, Samuel: 15, 22, 60, 93, 138, 681 (note 110); A Confederate
157, 166, 175, 190, 193, 195, 201, General from Big Sur: 264, 265, 312;
210, 220, 241-42, 248, 251, 260, 295, Hawkline Monster: 264, 265, 311,
308, 313, 315, 317, 323, 330, 331-32, 323; In Watermelon Sugar: 70, 265,
366, 367, 381, 404, 419, 442, 443, 297, 299, 300, 321, 323, 560, 561-63,
471, 484, 485-88, 492, 504, 505-06, 599-600; Trout Fishing in America:
508, 509-12, 522, 536-37, 539, 541, 196, 265, 266, 417
594, 602, 609, 642, 670 (notes 48 and
50), 684 (note 126); Endgame: 175; Brooks, Cleanth: 84, 217-18
“Imagination Dead Imagine”: 22,
313, 366, 484, 485-88, 594; Malone Burroughs, William: 15, 22, 43, 66,
Dies: 175, 260, 366; Molloy:175, 193, 67, 68, 70, 78, 295, 305, 318-19, 323,
331, 505-06; The Unnameable: 175, 468, 469, 484-85, 492-95, 557; The
295, 366, 419, 443, 509-12
Index 743

Exterminators: 66; Naked Lunch: 22, 472-73, 475, 508, 512-21, 532, 540,
43, 305, 318-19, 323, 484-85, 492-95 552, 556, 578, 600, 618, 630, 631,
638-40, 644, 650 The Adventures of
Calvino, Italo: 59, 62, 159, 243, 257, Lucky Pierre: 637, 638-40, 650; “The
297, 365, 416, 453, 628; “The Castle Baby Sitter”: 92, 264, 312; Briar
of Crossed Destinies”: 257; Invisible Rose: 234, 237, 257, 600; The Origin
Cities: 365; “Winter’s Night”: 297 of the Brunists: 126, 452; Pinochio in
Venice: 310-11; Pricksongs and
Camus, Albert: 212, 218-19, 221, Descants: 342, 472-73; “J’s
223, 226, 257, 264, 308, 653; The Marriage”: 247, 257; “The
Myth of Sisyphos: 217-18, 223 Gingerbread House”: 235, 257; “The
Marker”: 472-73; The Public
Carlyle, Thomas: 273, 287, 666 (note Burning: 18, 49, 69, 127, 221-22,
31) 272, 289, 291-93, 312, 435, 475, 508,
512-21, 532, 556, 644; The Universal
Character: 18, 19, 20, 21-22, 25, 30, Baseball Association: 135, 180, 197,
43, 59, 65, 66, 74,-75, 101, 108-09, 220, 236-37, 258, 286, 453
119, 121, 122, 127, 129, 130, 140-43,
153, 157, 161, 186, 194, 199, 237-38, Cortázar, Julio: 242, 243, 258,
249, 252, 254, 261-63, 269, 271, 278,
288, 295-96, 299, 305, 308-09, 311, Dectective Novel: 50, 51, 52, 198,
312, 313, 318, 320-22, 399, 344-45, 255, 311, 323, 565, 574, 582, 678-79
351, 354-57, 364, 378, 387, 390, 417- (note 90)
18, 423-585, 594, 605, 614, 619, 629,
644-45, 649-51, 673 (note 61), 674 Delillo, Don: 15, 69, 337-38, 343,-34,
(note 64, 678 (notes 88 and 89), 681- 363, 424, 628, 629, 630, 632, 655,
83 (notes 107-21) 656, 678 (note 89); White Noise: 337-
38, 343-34, 632; Underworld: 629,
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: 482, 547, 630, 632
591, 662 (note 11), 686 (note 141)
Deleuze, Gilles: 39, 40, 87, 123, 125,
Comic Mode: 16, 25-26, 28, 60, 61, 147-48, 222, 277-79, 297-98, 415,
76, 91-92, 131, 134, 143, 154, 162, 442, 444, 446-47, 474, 481, 494-95,
185-86, 253, 255, 306, 339, 344, 375, 541, 562, 680 (note 105)
388, 408, 414, 429, 440, 470, 480,
501-02, 517, 547, 558, 590-91, 601, Derrida, Jacques: 19, 26, 39, 40, 73,
606-23, 642, 643 76, 78, 81, 85, 86-87, 94, 119, 123,
124-25, 139, 140, 172-73, 185, 190,
Conrad, Joseph: 339, 344, 345, 352, 198-2001, 206, 244, 259-60, 278,
371, 372, 373, 374, 375, 406 279, 283, 284, 293, 297, 298, 299,
444, 454, 463, 474, 543, 562, 588,
Coover, Robert: 15, 18, 29, 30, 34, 590, 596, 613, 614-15, 662 (note 14),
45, 59, 60, 69, 71, 75, 92, 120, 126, 663 (note 23), 684 (note 125)
127, 132, 133, 135, 142, 180, 181-82,
197, 210, 213, 219, 220, 221-22, 234, Didion, Joan: 15, 337, 459
235, 236-37, 242, 247, 251, 253, 257,
258, 259, 264, 272, 286, 289, 289, Doctorow, E: L: 15, 18
290-93, 310, 312, 342, 435, 452-53,
744 From Modernism to Postmodernism

Dos Passos, John: 359, 385, 404 668 (note 43), 678 (note 89), 685
(note 136)
Dreck: 23, 63, 674 (note 63)
Eugenides, Jeffrey: 630, 645, 647-49,
Eco, Umberto: 50, 163, 198, 324, 652, 655
414-15, 458, 677 (note 87), 682 (note
114) Excess: 16, 42, 65, 66, 69, 71, 86, 88,
200, 258, 344, 356, 465, 468, 476,
Eighteenth-Century Novel: 187, 304, 479, 508, 522, 576, 522, 576, 580,
354, 682 (note 114) 584, 637-644

Eliot, T: S: 81, 84-85, 95, 275, 287, Existentialism: 14, 16, 18, 20, 21, 35,
326, 356, 542 37-38, 55, 75, 76, 78, 108, 113, 143,
151, 152, 158, 165, 168, 175, 186-87,
Elkin, Stanley: 15, 17, 27, 45, 65, 71, 190-91, 193-94, 200-216, 263, 264-
100, 126, 133, 134-35, 143, 159, 183, 68, 273-74, 278-80, 288, 291, 300,
198, 203, 213, 238, 256, 263, 296-97, 303, 325, 330-39, 360, 364, 371, 397,
305, 308-09, 311, 333-34, 342, 344- 402, 411, 424, 432, 443, 468, 470,
51, 364, 375, 376, 385, 389, 432, 434, 498, 501, 502, 505-06, 509, 522, 525-
435, 452, 501, 556-57, 659 (note 1), 26, 532, 534, 542, 546, 546, 558, 615,
678 (note 89) 679 (note 100), 682 618-19, 621, 630-31, 637, 638, 639-
(note 111), 684-85 (note 133); A Bad 40, 641, 651, 654, 665 (note 31), 667
Man: 345, 476; Boswell: A Modern (note 41), 688 (note 147).
Comedy: 256, 476, 501; The Dick
Gibson Show: 126, 134-35, 143, 238, Fantastic: 18, 20, 24, 30, 63, 65, 66,
256, 263, 296, 345, 346-49, 364, 375, 86, 101, 112, 119, 158, 160, 164, 188,
435; The Franchiser: 238, 256, 296- 215, 225-268, 277, 291, 331, 341,
97, 345-46, 376, 385, 679 (note 100); 342, 343, 368-69, 370-71, 379, 385,
The Living End: 342, 349-51, 556-57; 401, 406, 410, 411, 463, 492-93, 494-
“Plot”: 308-09, 474 95, 512, 514, 515, 519, 541, 550, 560,
570, 580, 593, 603, 609, 628, 629,
Ellis, Bret Easton: 635-36, 352 643, 668-72 (notes 44-60), 681 (note
107)
Emotion: 81, 96, 99, 136, 141, 167,
251, 295, 318, 321, 411, 413, 438, Farce: 25, 253, 294, 605, 606, 612-
440, 460, 463-73, 478, 479, 488, 490, 13, 647
494, 540, 542-44, 546, 550, 560-62,
573, 581, 587, 593-94, 604, 621, 630, Faulkner, William: 17, 42, 55, 60, 65,
635, 650, 683 (note 122), 685 (note 66, 129, 270, 326, 330, 357-58, 359,
131) 388, 430, 432, 558, 593

Entropy: 48, 75, 140, 156, 164, 170, Featherstone, Mike: 49, 94
171-72, 207, 238, 247, 251, 272, 297,
303, 312, 317, 328, 332, 342, 346, Federman, Raymond: 15, 22, 28, 30,
353, 375, 377, 385, 388, 405-06, 552, 34, 62, 66, 67-68, 74, 78, 96, 98, 119-
560, 561-62, 566, 568, 569, 573-74, 120, 127, 129, 131, 132, 133, 136-37,
575-76, 580, 600, 621, 667 (note 42), 151, 159-60, 173-74, 179, 186-87,
192, 196-97, 199, 241, 242, 248, 251,
Index 745

252, 262-67, 277, 295, 303, 305, 312- 471, 475, 553, 557, 560, 574-79, 599,
13, 314, 330, 367, 369, 371, 383-84, 639, 642, 679 (note 100), 681 (note
392, 419-22, 448-49, 450-51, 453, 107); JR: 24, 180, 247, 328-29, 343,
458, 478, 506-07, 521, 535-39, 591, 385, 405-06, 557, 560, 574-79, 679
616, 675 (note 72), 678 (note 89), 684 (note 100); The Recognitions: 15, 43,
(note 128); Double or Nothing: 74, 127-28, 166, 171, 172, 177, 180, 183-
120, 262, 277, 314, 421, 538; 84, 187, 210, 220, 296, 332-33, 378,
Surfiction: 295, 591; Take It or Leave 380, 435, 464, 468, 471, 475, 599
It: 159-60, 173-74, 196-97, 262-63,
420, 448, 448-49, 451, 678 (note 89); Gap: 16, 76, 77, 78, 100, 218, 219,
The Voice in the Closet: 74, 98, 159- 220-22, 245, 249, 258, 267-68, 283,
60, 251, 303, 369, 392; To Whom It 353, 381, 409, 461, 475, 490, 495-96,
May Concern: 205, 388. 525, 543, 630-36, 644, 645, 653-54,
675-76 (note 75), 680 (note 101)
Force: 19, 28, 30, 44, 58, 60, 78, 84,
85-88, 97, 118, 120, 121, 122, 123- García Márquez, Gabriel: 15, 187,
25, 128, 130, 132, 138-45, 149, 151, 240-43, 670 (note 48), 671-72 (note
153-54, 157-60, 166, 172-73, 175, 56)
184, 188, 218-19, 225, 232, 244, 246,
249, 259, 278, 297-99, 307-08, 313, Gass, William:15, 21, 22, 29, 30, 31,
321, 326-27, 329, 340, 344, 359, 361- 33, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 53, 56, 65, 66,
62, 379, 384, 387, 397, 405, 415, 429, 73, 76, 77, 78, 88, 92, 95, 98, 100,
445-46, 451-54, 481-82, 487, 494, 103, 119-20, 126, 131, 134, 135, 136,
541, 548, 561, 580-85, 592, 597, 600- 137, 140, 148, 156, 158, 161, 164,
04, 617, 632, 663 (notes 22 and 23), 167, 172, 176, 177, 180-81, 182-83,
697 (notes 26 and 28), 670 (note 49) 185-86, 192, 197, 203, 210, 242, 248,
252, 256, 272, 285-86, 339, 362-63,
Forster, E:M: 71, 341, 358, 427-29, 368, 370-71, 377, 378-79, 380-88,
678 (note 87), 685 (note 134) 391-92, 393-98, 435, 449, 453, 461-
62, 464, 467-68, 469, 475, 480, 482,
Foucault, Michel: 27, 39, 40, 55, 56, 496, 498, 502, 508, 531, 540-41, 555,
65, 72, 75, 85, 87, 94, 105, 117, 119, 563, 592, 598-99, 601-02, 637-38,
123, 125, 172, 173, 220, 258, 259, 679-80 (note 100), 680 (note 101),
284-85, 297, 299, 416, 438, 442, 444- 681 (note 107), 682 (note 111), 683
47, 450-54, 474, 491, 541, 552, 562, (note 119), 684 (note 128), 686 (note
588, 661 (note 7), 666 (note 36) 143); “Cartesian Sonata”: 15, 182; “A
Memory of a Master”: 192; In the
Franzen, Jonathan: 630, 646-9, 652, 655 Heart of the Heart of the Country and
Other Stories: “The Icicles”: 377;
Freud, Sigmund: 42, 165-67, 169, “The Master of the Second Revenge”:
180, 226, 229-30, 232, 238, 306, 340, 182-83; “Mrs: Mean”: 180, 256, 296,
410, 427, 430, 446, 474, 481, 584, 389, 475; “The Order of Insects”:
670 (notes 49 and 51), 397; Omensetter’s Luck: 21, 92, 100,
161, 296, 313, 368, 464, 468, 475,
Gaddis, William: 15, 24, 43, 45, 127- 480, 508, 530-35, 563, 598-99; On
28, 166, 171, 180, 183-84, 187, 210, Being Blue: 339, 686(note 143); The
220, 247, 295, 328-29, 332-33, 343, Tunnel: 15, 29, 156, 176, 177, 183,
378, 380, 385, 405-06, 435, 464, 468, 197, 248, 272, 285-86, 289-90, 286,
746 From Modernism to Postmodernism

336, 370-71, 278-79, 388, 389, 393- 555, 558, 606-07, 662 (note 10), 672-
98, 435, 461-62, 464, 496, 502, 637- 73 (note 61)
38; Willie Master’s Lonesome Wife:
449, 469 Heidegger, Martin: 38, 42, 65, 73, 76,
77-78, 94, 102, 117, 123, 124, 144,
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: 146- 173, 174, 181, 183, 190, 198, 199,
47, 183, 210 201, 203, 205-06, 298, 271, 278-79,
281-82, 284, 299, 362, 558, 614, 666
Goffman, Erving: 109, 118, 121, 685 (note 13), 667 (notes 37 and 39), 686
(note 135) (note 140)

Greimas, Algirdas J: 44, 79, 306, Heller, Joseph: 15, 43, 68, 70, 71, 75,
439-40, 683 (note 116) 247, 391, 466, 558, 613, 636, 672
(note 60)
Grotesque: 25, 26, 219, 226, 232,
239, 247, 388, 391, 406, 495, 548, Hemingway, Ernest: 17, 23, 24, 50,
553, 558, 584, 605, 606, 609-13, 620, 65, 66, 129, 159, 165, 330, 356, 357,
629, 630, 631-32, 634, 636, 653, 655 358, 359, 366, 492, 541, 686 (note
132)
Ground-Situation: 77, 92, 142, 206-
07, 221, 250, 263 History: 17, 27, 29, 41-45, 48, 60-62,
69-70, 80, 85, 91, 111, 129, 155, 173,
Habermas, Jürgen: 13, 40, 92, 106- 180, 242, 271-72, 281-304, 326, 354-
07, 148, 230, 284-85, 660-661 (note 55, 370-71, 393-94, 476, 513-14, 516,
7) 580, 601, 625, 632, 662 (note 10),
676 (note 78) 677 (note 86)
Hassan, Ihab: 27, 36, 37, 43, 60, 106,
172, 222, 362, 474 Husserl, Edmund: 25, 174, 183, 198,
203, 225, 483, 587, 665 (note 30),
Hawkes, John: 15, 17, 23, 27, 43, 45, 666 (note 35), 667 (note 37)
59, 63, 66, 70, 75, 103, 125-26, 127,
134, 137, 138-39, 201, 203, 207, 210, Imagination: 14, 17, 24-25, 35, 38,
211-14, 216, 217, 219, 242, 243, 248, 44, 73, 115, 118, 121, 126, 134, 137,
256, 258, 263, 256, 258, 263, 265, 142-43, 151, 154, 158, 160, 169, 180,
305, 314, 217, 322, 363, 392, 433, 186, 193, 201-2, 209, 214, 220, 225,
453, 466, 469, 470, 472, 480, 503, 228-29, 233, 237, 240, 246, 246, 256-
554, 557, 560, 591, 599, 600, 611, 57, 266, 277, 293, 299, 313, 327, 340,
636, 645, 664 (note 27), 682 (note 348, 381, 395, 413, 472, 473, 478,
111), 684 (128); Blood Oranges: 392, 486-87, 495, 501, 505-6, 510, 514,
407-10, 599, 600 ; The Cannibal: 15, 557, 562, 584-85, 587-604, 620, 642,
17, 23, 27, 43, 45, 70, 433, 611, 636; 659 (note 3), 668-49 (note 45), 685-
The Lime Twig: 134, 266, 554, 591; 86 (note 140), 686 (notes 141 and
Travesty: 203, 207, 211-14, 216, 256, 142), 686-87 (note 144), 687-88 (note
317, 470, 480, 560 146)

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: 56, Irony: 16, 26-27, 38, 59, 61-63, 71,
80, 94, 165, 180, 190, 283-84, 426, 84, 95, 143, 145, 182, 222, 253, 258,
461-63, 499-500, 510, 514, 551-52, 408, 457, 476, 477, 480, 481, 517,
Index 747

519, 532, 547, 565, 593, 594, 605, Kosinski, Jerzy: 15, 305, 391, 557,
615-17, 654-56, 667 (note 37), 676 611, 636
(note 80)
Labyrinth: 21, 61, 155, 251, 304, 309,
Iser, Wolfgang: 118-19, 122, 139, 315-17, 325, 366-67, 381-82, 389,
149, 154, 185, 236, 488, 541, 587, 401, 405, 518, 573, 680 (notes 100,
614, 620, 652-53, 654, 663 (note 18), 103, and 104)
670 (note 49), 684 (note 126) 685-86
(note 140) Lacan, Jacques: 25, 39, 108, 119,
147-48, 166-67, 190, 199, 213-14,
James, Henry: 17, 44, 145, 150, 238, 229-31, 260, 286, 325, 371, 439, 444,
250, 283, 330, 355-56, 358, 359, 364, 474, 588, 590, 663 (note 19), 681
449, 530, 553, 673 (note 61) (note 110)

Jameson, Frederick: 30, 36, 38, 39- Laing, Ronald D: 229-30, 231, 683,
40, 94, 106, 240, 243, 246, 280, 285- (note 115), 685 (note 133)
86, 295, 305, 360-61, 403-4, 426,
437, 465, 659 (note 4) 659-60 (note Language-Theory: 189, 240, 614
7) 671 (note 56), 679 (note 97), 681
(note 107) Lotman, Jurij: 19, 64-65, 127, 136,
261, 426, 428, 507, 541, 545, 553
Jaspers, Karl: 65, 183, 207, 208, 273
Lukács, Georg: 60, 65, 168, 283, 354-
Joyce, James:, 15, 42, 60, 66, 249, 55, 437, 631, 672-73 (note 61)
270, 274, 275, 287-88, 304, 308, 318,
326, 330-31, 356, 357, 359, 360, 363, Lyotard, Jean-François: 35, 39, 40,
404, 430, 558, 593, 644, 673 (61) 680 43, 50, 58, 85-86, 94, 106-7, 157,
(note 103) 241, 278-79, 299, 323-24, 342, 361,
362 465, 474, 509, 562, 590, 598,
Kafka, Franz: 15, 42, 60, 66, 147, 600-1, 631, 661 (note 7), 662 (note
179, 183, 220, 227-28, 229, 230, 231, 14)
275, 363, 367, 381-82, 402, 406, 411,
417, 509, 558, 669 (note 45), 670 Magic Realism: 20, 233, 239-44,
(note 48), 671 (note 54) 671 (note 54), 671-72 (note 56)

Kant, Immanuel: 24, 25, 79, 89, 102, Mailer, Norman: 34, 35, 44, 54, 75,
106, 137, 180-81, 188, 210, 215, 269, 202, 479
273, 361, 426, 462, 481, 483, 484,
496, 497-98, 500, 510, 587, 589, 590, McElroy, Bernard: 15, 16, 43, 479
591-604, 613, 687 (note 144), 687-88
(note 147) Melville, Herman: 17, 129, 145, 160,
341, 358, 359, 369, 530, 531, 597,
Kerouac, Jack: 358, 382-83, 385, 386 680 (note 103)

Kristeva, Julia: 147-48, 589-90, 666 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice: 102, 154,


(note 32), 686-87 (note 143): 273, 331, 483
748 From Modernism to Postmodernism

Monstrous: 25-26, 605, 606, 611-12, 199, 201, 222, 236, 245, 257, 259-60,
620 298, 362, 368, 375, 406, 409, 459,
502, 555, 590-91, 595-96, 605, 613-
Montage: 15, 16, 23, 28, 43, 114, 15, 621, 637, 687 (note 143), 680-81
136-37, 288, 328, 351, 364, 439, 440- (note 107)
44, 486, 493, 544, 575-76, 621
Pop Art: 46, 51, 97, 112-14, 591
Myth: 21, 47, 53, 622, 117, 181, 195,
204, 208, 236-37, 241, 244, 254, 257, Possibility-Thinking: 210, 215, 258,
291-94, 300, 301-2, 311, 323-30, 347, 267, 510, 517, 521, 615
515, 521, 665 (note 30), 672 (note 60)
679 (note 91), 687 (note 145) Pynchon, Thomas: 15, 16, 21, 23, 24,
45, 51, 59,, 65, 66, 68, 70, 71, 73, 75,
Nabokov, Vladimir: 15, 69, 167, 243, 100, 126, 127, 134, 137, 151-53, 165-
364, 367, 540, 674 (note 64), 66, 170, 171, 173, 177-78, 193-94,
197-98, 200, 207, 210, 221, 238, 239,
Nietzsche, Friedrich: 28, 42, 64, 81, 247, 250, 256, 264, 272, 285, 297,
85, 87, 89, 94, 123-25, 130, 140, 160, 312, 317, 322-23, 343, 375-76, 377,
169, 171, 172-74, 181, 197, 200, 208, 384, 409-10, 435-36, 464, 471, 512,
216, 283, 285, 298-99, 361-62, 426, 513, 520, 522, 556, 557, 560, 594,
444, 474, 613-14, 666 (note 36), 667 636, 645, 666(note 35), 667 (note 40),
(note 37), 676 (note 78). 670 (note 48), 677 (note 86), 678
(note 89), 680-81 (note 107);The
Nineteenth-Century Novel: 287, 341, Crying of Lot 49: 24, 100, 151-53,
355, 369, 431, 497, 565 211, 239, 311, 322, 343, 513, 556,
560 565-74; Gravity’s Rainbow: 59,
Ordinary: 21, 34, 55, 65-66, 148, 219, 68, 70, 171, 210, 272, 297, 300-4,
233, 267, 280, 300, 333, 339-54, 369, 322, 375-76, 520; Mason & Dixon:
387, 395, 546, 610, 629, 630, 633, 15, 126, 134, 177-78, 285, 398-401,
644, 646, 649, 655, 671 (note 53), 464;V: 68, 173, 194, 197-9, 200, 250,
678 (note 89) 256, 264, 312, 322, 377, 384, 471,
594
Paradox: 20, 48, 52, 76, 92, 101-2,
124, 135, 138, 176-79, 185-86, 199, Reed, Ishmael: 15, 18, 24, 37, 69, 70,
213, 217-223 228, 240, 245, 256, 167, 263, 311, 312, 329, 383, 560-61,
300, 336, 349, 375, 379, 399, 409, 580-85, 612, 619; Flight to Africa:
426, 466, 491, 517, 601, 631, 636, 69; Mumbo Jumbo: 18, 24, 37, 70,
644, 661 (note 7), 668 (note 43) 167, 263, 329, 383, 560-61, 580-85

Parody: 23, 25-26, 30, 38, 55, 57, 61- Robbe-Grillet, Alain: 21, 22, 27, 44,
62, 74, 132, 136, 144, 166, 171, 188, 243, 295, 305, 315, 362, 366-67, 381,
195, 254, 255, 324, 335, 350, 437, 383, 389, 416, 448, 468, 485, 488-92,
467, 514, 547, 563, 565, 575, 588, 493, 494, 487, 539, 664 (note 26),
590, 609, 617-19, 639-40, 667 (note 670 (note 48), 684 (note 127), 684
37), 669 (note 45) (note 129); In the Labyrinth: 367;
Jealousy: 22, 485, 488-92, 494, 497;
Play:16, 26, 59, 68, 77, 81, 86, 106, Marienbad: 325; New Novel: 448,
133, 137, 139, 143, 161-62, 181, 191, 684 (note 127), 684 (note 129)
Index 749

Talking Bad Conditions Blues: 134,


Satire: 25, 171, 186, 226, 290-91, 265; Out: 74, 137, 278, 307, 384,
350, 413, 428-29, 542-48, 574, 585, 419-20, 448, 556; “The Permanent
605, 606-9, 611, 613, 617, 621, 671 Crisis”: 476, 508, 526-29; Up: 74,
(note 53), 688 (notes 148 and 149) 137, 278, 263, 266, 475

Sartre, Jean-Paul: 25, 34-38, 118-19, Symbol: 20, 30, 52, 57, 117-18, 131-
163, 181, 199, 201, 203, 204-5, 207, 32, 144-62, 163, 251, 256, 260, 275,
208, 221, 234, 245, 483, 554, 587, 311, 346, 355-56, 358, 371, 373, 382,
650, 670 (note 49), 687 (note 147) 384, 416-18, 420, 430, 453, 484, 508,
566, 568-70, 595, 598-99, 634, 648,
Serres, Michel: 110, 123, 541, 664 663 (note 19), 665 (note 30), 673
(note 26) (note 61), 679 (note 99), 679-80 (note
100), 680 (note 101)
Sontag, Susan: 13, 30, 36, 37, 43, 44,
52-53, 90, 93-94, 362, 662 (note 12) System: 24, 39, 41, 42, 44, 45, 52, 57,
67, 68, 71, 73-75, 78, 80, 98, 106,
Sorrentino, Gilbert: 66, 67, 68, 70, 109-10, 120, 124-25, 141, 154, 166,
73, 74, 75, 77, 180, 205, 263, 266, 169, 171-73, 189, 193-94, 199, 201,
368-69, 376, 425, 441, 454-57, 468, 210-11, 230, 235, 239, 249, 281, 291,
469, 470, 471, 472, 475, 492, 497-98, 302, 311, 322, 324, 327, 346, 359,
506, 507, 550, 557, 618; Mulligan 362, 375-76, 415, 416, 421, 423, 427,
Stew: 74, 180, 205, 263, 368-69, 376, 431, 435-36, 445-46, 450, 455, 466,
425, 441, 454-57, 471, 472, 475, 497- 468, 471, 474, 480, 481-92, 497, 506,
98, 507, 550, 557; Splendide-Hotel: 508, 513-21, 544, 548, 552-53, 5557-
67, 266 58, 566, 568-84, 609, 621, 627, 636,
642 (note 8), 667 (note 442), 674
Spanos, William: 37-38, 78, 175, 201, (note 63), 675 (note 72), 684 (note
678-80 (note 90) 125)

Spencer, Sharon: 64, 275-76, 422 Todorov, Tveztan: 226-28, 237, 275,
439, 668 (note 44), 669-70 (note 48),
Stein, Gertrude: 17, 305, 431, 676 683 (note 116)
(note 87)
Trash: 23, 63, 65, 97, 205, 206, 248,
Sukenick, Robert: 15, 17, 28, 29, 62, 377, 406, 674 (note 63)
66, 67, 68, 70, 73, 64, 68, 96, 07, 98,
103, 126, 127, 129, 133, 134, 137-38, Vaihinger, Hans: 149, 171, 185-88,
141, 159, 167, 169, 192, 219, 221, 483, 497-98, 512
243, 245, 248, 251-52, 263, 266, 270,
277-78, 295, 303-4, 306, 312, 321, Vattimo, Gianni: 17, 94, 123, 124,
367, 384, 419-20, 422, 442-43, 444, 142, 362, 543, 590
448, 450, 451, 452, 453, 460, 469,
475, 476, 507, 508, 526-29, 539, 540, Vonnegut, Kurt: 15, 23, 69, 70, 75,
542, 556, 616, 637, 659 (note 1), 670 126, 131-32, 171, 247, 296, 315, 367,
(note 50), 673 (note 62), 679 (note 382, 387, 451, 548, 549-556, 562,
100), 681 (note 107), 682 (note 111), 599, 672 (note 60), 678 (note 89), 681
684 (note 128), 684 (note 131); Long (note 107), 688 (note 149); Cat’s
750 From Modernism to Postmodernism

Cradle: 68, 171, 297; Slaughterhouse


Five: 70, 126, 131-32, 296, 315, 382,
387, 549, 556, 562, 599, 678 (note
89)

Wittgenstein, Ludwig: 42, 73, 106,


175, 180, 183, 190, 191-98, 200, 235,
237, 285, 353, 371, 401, 465, 469,
471, 483-84, 491, 498, 506, 511, 525,
614, 650, 667 (note 40)

Wolfe, Thomas: 17, 53-54, 55, 315,


326, 542, 574, 643, 659 (note 1), 685
(note 131)

Woolf, Virginia: 21, 85, 150, 249,


270, 274, 326, 330, 356, 357, 358,
376-77, 393, 430, 431-32, 673 (note
61)

Wurlizer, Rudolf: 15, 23

Zeno: 74, 101-2, 163-64, 171, 176-


78, 179, 183, 222, 388

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